University of Cape Town

Department of French Language and Literature

Tracing Memory: Representation and the Auschwitz Experience in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et Apres

A Dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Heidi Grunebaum-Ralph

April 1997

The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non-commercial research purposes only.

Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author.

ABSTRACT

Tracing Memory: Representation and the Auschwitz Experience in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et Apres

by Heidi Grunebaum-Ralph

This study aims to examine the ways in which memory is

represented in Auschwitz survivor, Charlotte Delbo's

literary trilogy, Auschwitz et Apres, (Auschwitz and After)

(1970a;1970b;1971). Its examination of memory is premised

on the understanding of survivor narrative as testimonial

narrative and testimony as the telling of the memory of

historical events which strain or exceed conventional

frameworks of representation. As such, the aim of this

study is to demonstrate the way that representations of

memory of a limit-experience problematise the certainty of

its own testimonial transmission. By attempting to

theorise the dynamics of narrating personal memory and then

by analysing key extracts in each volume of the trilogy,

this examination attempts to demonstrate how the event of

the Holocaust, the difficulty of being a survivor and an

unwilling reception of the survivor's story are

collectively implicated in the way that memory contests its

own representation. By examining the discontinuities of

memory, this study intends to show how, in very different

ways, the silences and ruptures of memory which are

produced in these readings are a remembering of a different

form.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study would not have been realisable if it were

not for the generous assistance received from a number of institutions.

The financial assistance of the Centre for Science Development (HSRC, South Africa) towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the Centre for Science Development.

I would also like to acknowledge, gratefully, the financial assistance received from the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research at the University of Cape Town as well from the University of Cape Town Research Committee.

No work can be written without the energy, help and encouragement from others. I am eternally grateful to my supervisor Dr Rolf Wolfswinkel whose encouragement and wise counsel has consistently sustained this project since its inception. His support for my work helped me to renew this study at a time when everything seemed to have disappeared under a black cloud of despair. Without that unflagging support, this project would not have come to completion. From those long conversations emerged a shared enthusiasm and respect for Charlotte Delbo's work. I am indebted to my supervisor Professor Jean-Louis Cornille whose ideas and insights have, over the past years, offered me hopeful glimpses of an intellectual journey nourished by a deep love of the literary text which has inspired me, in turn, to try and embark on that path. A warm thanks to Professor Milton Shain for his kind words and constructive advice. For their time, energy and eager helpfulness, I am grateful to Madame Halperyn and the staff at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris; Yvonne Verblun at the Jacob Gitlin Library in Cape Town and Veronica Belling of the Jewish Studies Library at the University of Cape Town.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Vije Franchi for her generous hospitality in Paris. Her unflagging love, friendship, support and critical observations helped me through a particularly anguished period in the course of this study. To Claudia Braude, whose encouragement, valuable criticism, intellectual and emotional nurturing have provided me with an invaluable resource and whose intellectual honesty and courage continues to serve as an inspiration, I am indebted. Debbie Sheward, Jon Stratton, Steven Robins and Oren Stier have contributed, in the course of thought-provoking and stimulating conversations, to the final text. I am grateful to my family, Brian, Leonie, Mark and Sylvia for their encouragement, unflagging belief and unconditional love and to Derek and Lilly for their warmth, deep friendship and perennial hospitality.

It is finally Michael, to whom I am indebted in ways I will never be able to express. His friendship, love, support, soothing words, critical comments and unfailing wisdom are present in every page of this work.

/

In loving memory of Adelaide Mhkurnbuzi

For.Michael

CONTENTS:

Foreword 1

Chapter One: Charlotte Delbo and Holocaust Memory I. From Resistance to Survival 9 II. Auschwitz et Apres: Survival as Resistance

Truth/Truthfulness/Authenticity: Approaches to Meaning 15

III. Auschwitz Memory: Bodies/borders/boundaries 20 Tortured Memory: The Survivor and the True Witness 27 Remembering the Body's Effacement 30 Dismembered Bodies, Displaced Memories 33 Collapsing Memories, Narrating Memories 35 Common memory, Historical Consciousness and 39 Narrating Rupture

Chapter Two: Aucun de nous ne reviendra I. Shattered Memory: a Programme for Representation 45

The Double-Bind of Representation 47 Silence: Deep Memory on the Threshold of Testimony 49

II. Crisis of naming: Dying effaces Death 52 Dysfunctional Throats:Story of an Untold Story 56 Burning Thirst and the Need to Bear Witness 59 Representing Powerlessness: Paralysed Bodies, Silent Testimonies 64 Numeration: Transacting Power 68

Chapter Three: Une Connaissance Inutile I. The Book becomes Witness 77

Representations of the Double Bind: Citation 80 Apollinaire, Poetry, Common Memory: An Intertextual Dialogue 84 Politics of Language: Duplicity and Survival 90

II. Moliere read through Auschwitz 96 Tombstones and Texts: Memory as Resistance, as Survival 102

Chapter Four: Mesure de nos jours I. The Survivor's Last Word 107

Survivor Memory: The Train Back and the Burial 109 Burnt Books, Defunct Words: Return as Forgetting 111

II. Discontinuities of Survival A. Deep Memory and Dreams of Return to Auschwitz 118 B. Dreams of Return as the Unlistened to Story 120 c. Return Disrupted by Deep Memory's Temporalities 124 D. The Ghost/Writer Returns 127

III. Ending with Return 130

Afterwords 137

Bibliography 138

Ce livre n'est pas un document historique. Si la notion de hasard (comme la plupart des notions) ne paraissait pas absurde a ]'auteur, il dirait volontiers que toute reference a une epoque, un territoire OU une ethnie determines est fortuite. Les evenements relates pourraient surgir en tout lieu et en tout temps d~n-: l 'rune de n, importe quel homme, planete, mineral ... (Piotr Rawicz Le Sang de Ciel)

Pas de mot, pas de terme, le langage cesse, je ne me suis pas retourne, derobe soudain a ma vue, soudain si pleinement absent, toi, si totalement dissipes, eux, evapores, Lui, Elle, annihile, moi, de la rarefaction de vide, de la quintessence de neant, m'avanqant vers le fond sans fond du non-etre, rien, plus rien, plus rien de rien, frappe brutalement, brusquement, a hurler, par ce silence (Serge Doubrovsky La Dispersion, p.333)

Textes qui nous apprennent (sans que cela fasse l'objet d'un enseignement) a nous souvenir de ce qui desormais doit faire le fond de notre memoire, a tOUS 1 jeunes OU Vieux, juifs OU non­juifs [sic] , si cette cassure insensee de 1 'espece humaine en deux peu t, apres Auschwitz, encore faire sens. Cassure voulue par les antisemites et les nazis pour qui le juif signifie la repulsion, l'Autre dans toute son horreur, [ ... ], expulse, exile, extermine. (Sarah Kofman, Paroles Suffoquees, p.14 J

1

FOREWORD

La fragmentation, marque d'une coherence d'autant plus ferme qu'il lui faudrait se defaire pour s'atteindre, non par un systeme disperse, ni la dispersion comme systeme; mais la mise en pieces (le dechirement) de ce qui n'a jamais preexiste (reellement ou idealementl comme ensemble, ni davanta~e ne pourra se rassembler dans quelque presence d'avenir que ce soit. L'espacement d'une temporalisation qui ne se saisit - fallacieusement - que comme absence de temps. (Maurice Blancbot L'Ecriture du Desastre, p.99)

In an essay entitled "The Holocaust as Literary

inspiration", well-known writer Eli Wiesel, Auschwitz

survivor, makes the observation that memory's intervention

in contemporary public discourse is in the form of the

testimonial utterance. Implicit in his formulation is the

idea that if memory gestures to the past, its articulation

is in service of a particular vision of the future. Thus,

he comments that,

[ ••• J the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony. We have all been witnesses and we all feel we have to bear testimony for the future. {Felman & Laub,1992:5-6)

Clearly then, Wiesel implies that after the Holocaust the

discursive gesture becomes the testimonial. At the centre

of this proposition is a break with traditional generic

categorisations, precisely as testimonial response to that

event, the Holocaust, which has precipated the rupture.

Taking up Wiesel's formulation of testimony as

innovative literary form, literary critic Shoshana Felman

outlines what is at stake in such a formulation:

As a relation to events, seems to be composed of pieces of a memory that overwhelmed by occurrences

testimony bits and has been that have

2

not settled into understanding or acts that cannot be as knowledge nor

remembrance, constructed assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference. (1992:5)

Thus, as a discursive form, testimony comes to narrate

memory's "bits and pieces", that is, its truth emerges in

its representation of the shards of memory of an

experience-at-the-limits.

The aim of the present study is to examine these

shards, the remnants of memory which are represented in

Holocaust survivor narrative. What emerges in the course

of this study is, however, an interrogation of the ways

that these texts, testimonial narrative par excellence,

come to reveal self-doubt, confusion and silence regarding

their own status as testimony. Fundamental to the

historical truth-claim of the survivor's text is his/her

immediacy to the event, as eye-witness. Yet the narration

of memory in the wake of literally un-believable trauma

often proceeds in ways which paradoxically subvert the

grounds of the survivor's claims to credibility and

veracity. Through the examination of the ways in which

memory is represented in Auschwitz survi var, Charlotte

Delbo's trilogy, entitled Auschwitz et Apres, (Auschwitz

and After) (1970a; 1970b; 1971), this study aims to

demonstrate that such expressions of hesitation and doubt

strain at the very cognitive limits which threaten to

explode even the narrative framework of testimony. If

testimonial narrative presents the fragments of memory as

witness to a historical event that has literally defied

imagination, then the silences and discontinuities which

conversely emerge through that narration problematise the

grounds of their own production.

Forgetting what is remembered is as much a question of

reception, of the addressee's reading and assimilating

3

testimony, as it is a question of representation. The

trilogy which will be examined, comprising of three volumes

successively entitled Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of

us will return) , Une Connaissance inutile (A Useless

Knowledge) and Mesure de nos jours (Mesure of our days)

reveal, in very different ways, that the silences and

ruptures of memory, are precisely a remembering of a

different form. Literary critic, George Steiner addresses

this difference when he argues in his gloss of French

philosopher Henri Lefebvre's theorisations of

speech/silence that 11 [s] ilence has 'another speech than

ordinary saying', (un autre Dire que le dire ordinaire),

but it is meaningful speech nevertheless."

(Steiner,1969:75)

An essential insight into the way tha~ the addressee

is implicated in the cognitive reception and assimilation

of the events of the Holocaust is offered by Claude Lanzman

in his description of his first meeting with eye-witness

survivors. In his research which led up to the making of

his film on the Holocaust, Shoah, he recounts how after

consulting archives, books, journals, in short, all sources

of scholarship which would provide him with a scholarly

foundation he finally approached the survi vars only to

discover that,

{ ... Jil y avait un decalage absolu entre le savoir livresque que j'avais acquis et ce que me racontaient ces gens. Je ne comprenais plus rien. Il y avait d'abord la difficulte de les faire parler. Non qu'ils refusent de parler. Quelques-uns sont fous et incapables de rien transmettre. Mais ils avaient vecu des experiences tellement limites qu'ils ne pouvaient pas les communiquer. La premiere fois que j'ai vu Srebnik, le survivant de Chelmno { ... ]I il m'a fait un recit d'une confusion extraordinaire, auquel je n'ai rien compris. Il avait

4

tellement vecu dans 1 'horreur qu 'il etai t ecrase. (In an interview with Lanzmann in Chevrie et le Roux,1990:294) [ ... ] there was an absolute breach between the knowledge from the books which I had acquired and what these people were telling me. I no longer understood anything. There was the initial difficulty of making them speak. Not that they refused to speak. Some of them were mad and incapable of communicating anything. But they had lived such limit experiences that they were unable to communicate them. The first time that I saw Srebnik, the survivor from Chelmno [ ... ], he told me a story of extreme confusion of which I understood nothing. He had lived so much in the horror that he was wiped out . 1

It is this decalage absolu (absolute breach) between the 11 incredible" story of the survivor, which; outside of the

cognitive structures of reason appears to be a story of 11 madness 11

, of "confusion" and of non-sense and its

historical assimilation through the confining limits of

representational resources which frame reliable historical

narratives. (White, 1978; Friedlander,1993)

Between totalising historical accounts of the past,

individual expressions of memory and collective

commemorative gestures, the survivor's narration is often

appropriated as an underpinning to a cultural, theological,

or nationalistic grand-narrative of Memory (and in some

cases, competing Memories). (Bedarida, 1993) This

examination of the textual representation of memory aims,

however, to analyse the expressions of silence, of

disbelief, of discontinuity which reside within and between

1 My translation of the extract from the interview with Lanzmann.

5

the "bits and pieces" of memory as a necessarily

supplementary reading to the historical truths produced in

responsible, if hegemonic, histories of the Holocaust.

Its supplementarity resides in its retrieval of silenced

voices, the unlistened to stories of the "mad", 11 confused 11

memories which remain in the caesura of catastrophe. As

such, the examination of memory which I have outlined

intends to study the 11 forms of discontinuity" (Todorov,

1994:171) which are presented in Holocaust survivor

narrative.

The first section of Chapter One offers a brief

biographical background to Charlotte Delbo, before

proceeding, in the second section, to examine the title of

the trilogy, Auschwitz et Apres, and how it is implicated

in a historical trajectory of theoretical debates which

surround the study of the Holocaust. This examination

articulates, by way of demonstration, the interdisciplinary

underpinnings which inform this study's frames of

analytical reference. The third section of this chapter

sets up a theorisation of memory, based on a short essay

written by Delbo. This theorisation examines the

f unctionings of personal memory as embodied memories which

are at the centre of all narrative representations of

Holocaust survivor testimony. In this setting out of the

processes of the personal memory of the survivor, the body

is revealed as an important symbolic and referential

presence which becomes central to thinking through the

processes and narration of memory.

Chapter Two examines the Aucun de nous ne Reviendra,

the first volume of Delbo's trilogy as a setting out of an

aesthetic programme for the representation of Holocaust

memory. The first section examines how the crisis which

the Holocaust presents to its representation is symptomatic

of a fundamental impasse located in the survivor's

simultaneous inability to speak and her/his need to speak,

6

to bear witness. The dynamics of this impasse is explored

with reference to Gregory Bateson's theory of the double­

bind (1956} and the way that this explanatory framework

operates as a mechanism which produces silences and

disruptions within the narration itself. The second

section of this chapter explores the tropes of these

silences as they are produced in the narration of the

Auschwitz experience in Delbo's texts which highlight, in

turn, the radical alienation of the individual in the camps

and the way in which language becomes implicated as an

agency of the dehumanisation process and its

representations.

My analysis of the second volume, Une Connaissance

Inutile, in Chapter Three, examines the way that Delbo's

text refers to a literary corpus of poetic and dramatic

texts, a national literary tradition. In this way, I

proceed, in the first section of this chapter, to determine

how the engagement of these "canonised" texts with Delbo's

narration of the concentration-camp experience, reflects

the way that the literary text becomes implicated in the

historicisation, as rupture, of the historical event which

it narrates. The second section of this chapter examines

the way that representations of text, literary,

dramatic, poetic, topographic and enumerative - as an aid

to memory, become a trope of memory and of oral

memorisation. This, in turn, offers some insight into what

constitutes emotional and psychological resistance in the

concentration camp.

Mesure de nos jours, the final volume of the trilogy,

is the subject of examinination in Chapter Four. The first

section of this chapter focuses the signification of "after

Auschwitz" on the individuals who survive, return and

struggle to find meaning "after Auschwitz" in a world that

of ten cannot acknowledge their return nor listen to their

stories. · These survivor' s are represented as those "mad 11

7

and 11 confused" voices, referred to by Lanzmann, which are

banished to the margins of collective memory. The second

section examines the tropes which are employed in

representing the experience of the discontinuity of return

and survival as a radical ontological alienation, which, as

we shall see, calls into question many conceptual

assumptions which are central to contemporary theorisations

of survivor testimony.

The theoretical framework which informs this study is

necessarily interdisciplinary. Literary, historical,

historiographic, philosophical and psychoanalytical sources

are consulted and critiqued through their enga9ement with

the primary texts. In this way, interdisciplinarity

functions as way of making-visible the materiality of

theoretical approaches to Holocaust and genocide studies

and, by extension, the possible limitations of these •

positions.

The engagement of this study with different

disciplines is clearly reflected in its presentation of and

participation in academic and cultural debates around the

Holocaust. It should be noted that in order to effectively

reflect the way that Charlotte Delbo's texts reveal what is

at stake in her representation of Holocaust memory, my own

methodological strategy has been purposefully to avoid

resolution. Although I examine what is revealed through

the problematisation of the generic categorisation of

Delbo's texts and through the question of historical

authenticity of her texts I do not attempt to resolve these

questions. My contention is that resistance to generic

categorisation of fictional or imaginative literature

written by a survivor, bears witness to the extent of the

dilemma that the Holocaust presents to representation, to

assimilation. As such, this would constitute a historical

truth in and of itself.

The Holocaust has come to be referred to in many

8

different terms. Once again the very terms which name the

events are problematised, anticipating difficulty in

speaking about, remembering and representing the Holocaust.

In order to reflect the interpretative strategy of my

textual analyses which, in their examination of fragments,

silences, discontinuities and ruptures, aim rather to raise

questions and to open the texts up to further readings, I

alternatively employ the terms Shoah, Holocaust, Lager,

Auschwitz as well as the Auschwitz experience.

It is hardly coincidental that this question of

nameability of the Shoah is directly linked to the question

of "knowing 11, as historical, those events. Charlotte Delbo

frames the theoretical questions relating to the

knowability of an event situated at the faul tlines of

representation as a question of language. Embedding the

notions of knowability and nameability in the possibility

of surviving trauma and then recalling it, she writes, 11 Je

reviens I d'au dela de la connaissance I il faut maintenant

desapprendre je vois bien qu'autrement / je ne pourrais

plus vivre. 11 (1970b:l91) 2 (I have returned from a place

beyond knowing/knowledge, now I have to unlearn, it is

clear that otherwise I would no longer be able to live.)

Can one reconstitute the scattered fragments of life,

and the silence of shattering memories after surviving

Auschwitz and then frame these questions as a literary

project? How, then, can testimony be responsibly,

ethically read and what are the limits of such readings?

How is testimony to the survival of extreme trauma to be

read fifty years later?

2 Rosette Lamont has recently translated Delbo's trilogy into English. The English version has been published by Yale University Press (1995) . Having been unable to obtain a copy of Lamont's translation, I have, therefore, translated all quoted extracts from the trilogy myself, unless otherwise indicated.

9

CHAPTER I

CHARLOTTE DELBO AND HOLOCAUST MEMORY

L'oubli eEEacerait ce qui ne Eut jamais inscrit : rature par laquelle le non-ecrit semble avoir laisse une trace qu'il Eaudrait obliterer, glissement qui en vient a se construire un operateur par ou le il sans sujet, lisse et vain, s'englue, s'enduit dans l'abime dedouble du je evanescent, simule, imitation de rien, qui se Eigera dans le Moi certain duquel tout ordre revient. (Maurice Bla.nchot L'Ecriture du Desaetre,p.135)

I. FROM RESISTANCE TO SURVIVAL

Not widely known as a writer in France, Charlotte

Delbo has been, till recently, even less known outside of

France. 3 The lack of biographical information available

concerning Charlotte Delbo is reflected in her relative

anonymity and, as we will see, is disproportionate to the

potential impact that her literary works should have on the

major debates which have emerged in scholarship on the

Shoah.

Prior to her arrest, internment in Paris and

deportation to Auschwitz, Delbo had been a member of the

Communist Youth organisation and assistant to the renowned

director, Louis Jouvet of the Theatre de l 'Athenee in

Paris. Whilst touring with the theatrical company in

Buenos-Aires in 1941 she read about the decapitation in

Paris of her friend, Andre Woog, on allegations of

3 This is all the more striking since Delbo's texts are published by Editions de Minuit, one of the most famous and reputable publishers of the post-Second World War era in France. Initially a Resistance press, Minuit later became specialist publishers of the Nouveau Roman, innovative literary form which challenged the limits of representation in the novel. I am indebted to Professor Jean-Louis Cornille for drawing my attention to these details.

Lawrence Langer (1978) , Ellen Fine (1986) and Sidra Ezrachi {1980) have written about Charlotte Delbo and her texts in English.

10

possessing anti-nazi material. Apparently against the

advice of Jouvet, Delbo decided to return to France,

joining her husband, Communist activist.and intellectual,

Georges Dudach, in his anti-nazi underground activities in

the Communist network of the Resistance. After four months

of living under assumed identities in Paris, she and Dudach

were arrested by French police on 2 March 1942 and

imprisoned at la Sante. Three months after Duda ch was

executed by a firing squad on 23 May 1942 at Mont Valerien,

Delbo was transferred to and kept prisoner in the

Romainville fort. There she remained for nine months

before finally being deported from Compiegne, in France, on

24 January 1943. It was at Romainville where she made

acquaintance with many of the compatriots who shared her

experiences and living quarters at Auschwitz-Birkenau and

whose voices emerge in these texts, dedicated to those who

died as well as those who survived.

Deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau for "Activites anti­

allemandes" {Delbo, 1965:13) (Anti-German activities) in a

convoy with two hundred and twenty-nine other women, Delbo

was to be one of forty-nine survivors of that convoy to

survive and to return from Auschwitz. She attributes this

relatively high number of survivors to the fact that there

were no Jewish deportees in the convoy, a factor which

would have greatly diminished the survival rate of the

convoy, since the difference in treatment of Jewish

deportees was great already from arrival. (Delbo, 1965:16)

The convoy which transported Delbo to Auschwitz was

comprised,' for the most part, of combatants and members of

the French Resistance, it also included common law

criminals and some women, who, through bureaucratic or

judicial error, were included in the deportation.

The second text which Delbo wrote on her return, le

Convoi du 24 janvier (1965), sketches the biographies, in

varying degrees of detail / of all ·of the women of the

11

convoy of that eponymous date and offers a sociological and

ethnographic analysis of the convoy and its survival rate

(16-19). According to her, that specific convoy was the

last "political" convoy to arrive at Auschwitz. (20)

Seventy three days after arriving at Auschwitz­

Birkenau seventy deportees remained of the original convoy,

including Delbo, whose tattooed Auschwitz number was 31

661. On 1 July 1943 she and seventeen compatriots were

moved to Raisko, to work in a laboratory near to Auschwitz

I, the main camp. Following an agreement with German

industrial giant, I. G. Farben, German scientists had

imported seeds of 11 kok-saghyz 11 , a strain of dandylion, back

from Russia to see whether the latex contained in the roots

of the plant could be cultivated in order to produce a

rubber. In Raisko, vastly improved living and working

conditions contributed to increasing the chances of her

survival. Seven months after transfer to Raisko, ten

deportees of the original convoy, including Delbo, were

transferred to the women's camp of Ravensbruck. Between 7

January 1944 and 16 August 1944 the remaining of the - at

this point - fifty-four survivors of the original convoy

were transferred to Ravensbruck. Following the liberation

of Ravensbruck, Delbo returned to France, via Sweden, and

so, on the 23 April 1945, three years after being arrested

there, she finally returned to Paris. Forty-nine deportees

from that January convoy had survived.

After the war Delbo worked for the United Nations and,

from the sixties, for the Centre National des Recherches

Scientifiques in Paris in collaborat,ion with philosopher,

Henri Lefebvre. In 1946 she wrote the first volume of her

trilogy on Auschwitz. Entitled Aucun de nous ne Reviendra,

this volume, a literary text, was put aside by Delbo for

almost twenty years before being published.

II. AUSCHWITZ ET APRES: SURVIVAL AS RESISTANCE

SL.Lr v 1 v a..l 12

The Auschwitz et Apres trilogy is an autobiographical

and biographical depiction of the concentration camp

experience. The three volumes intersperse narrative

vignettes of prose and poetry, conflating and juxtaposing

a variety of genres and narrative strategies in a manner

which, as we will see in my discussion of Holocaust memory,

structurally resembles the difficult passage of memory from

repression, selection and substitution to its articulation,

narration and textual representation.

In order to understand the ways in which Delbo's texts

function as seminal to the debate regarding representation

and aestheticisation of the Auschwitz experience, it is

useful to examine how the title of Delbo's literary trilogy

evokes just what is at stake in discussions regarding the

Shoah and then to determine the importance of these texts

regarding these discussions.

The trilogy, Auschwitz et Apres, attempts to examine

issues raised by the event of Auschwitz in Western

consciousness from three different approaches. I would like

to think through the significance of the title since it

contains the explicit suggestion that the implications of

"Auschwitz" resonate in eternal relation to and beyond

Auschwitz, the event. Clearly, then, "after", the temporal

deictic, can never be a neutral referent since it is

uttered in perpetual reference to Auschwitz. A new

beginning is precisely sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman's

characterisation of the Shoah whose impact on Western

consciousness is theorised as a temporal and modal rupture

with Enlightenment project of Modernity. {Bauman, 1989)

Possibly, one of the best-known formulations of a

response to the Holocaust which defines the. resistance of

Auschwitz to cognitive assimilation as, essentially, a

problem of language has been that of Theodor Adorno whose

well known dictum is an argument against the

aestheticisation of the Shoah. "After Auschwitz," Adorno

13

has written, "it is no longer possible to write poems".

(quoted in Felman & Laub, 1992:33) This proposition, oft­

cited and often read as an advocation of silence as the

only adequate response in the face of Auschwitz, points to

the essential dilemma in which the Shoah survivor finds

him/herself. This dilemma, present in Adorno' s

proposition, clearly suggests that if speech is a solvent

whose agency radically dilutes the horrors, carnage,

inhumanities and suffering of Auschwitz and its survivor,

how much more is the dissimulation of poetic discourse's

aestheticising impulse. Predicated on formulations such

as Adorne's, aestheticising the Shoah came to be seen, from

one point of view, as a betrayal of the memory of those who

did not return, the unnamed, unburied, vanished dead. In

the face of language and its limited representational

resources, silence has been considered to be a more

appropriate response. (Steiner, 1969: 76} This position

has, initially, been empirically supported by the

historical response of silence from the survivors, a

response which, as we will see in Chapter Four, has often

been a question of reception, a resistance to listening on

the part of the addressee, and not purely a question of an

unsayability on the part of the survivors.

As Delbo's texts demonstrate, Adorne's dictum could

be read not as a demand for silence, but as a demand for

poetic discourse to make present its submission to

Auschwitz and, in its emergence, to make present the traces

of breakage, rupture and displacement inherent within the

very structures of post-Auschwitz language. This is a

position which is taken up later by Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard

when he suggests that it is precisely the rupture or the

collapse of language in the face of Auschwitz that must be

represented, a move which entails a shift in the very

representational strategies of discourse:

14

Le diff erend est l 'eta t instable et l'instant du langage ou quelque chose qui doit pouvoir etre mis en phrases ne peut pas l'etre encore. Cet etat comporte le silence qui est une phrase negative, mais il en appelle aussi a des phrases possibles en principe. Ce que l 'on nomme ordinairemen t 1 e sentiment signale cet etat. << On ne trouve pas ses mots >>, etc. Il faut beaucoup chercher pour trouver les nouvelles regles de formation et d'enchainement de phrases capables d'exprimer le differend que trahit le sentiment si l 'on ne veut pas que ce differend soit aussitot etouffe en un litige, et que l'alerte donnee par le sentiment ait ete inutile. C'est l'enjeu d'une litterature, d'une philosophie, peut-etre d'une politique, de temoigner des differends en leur trouvant des idiomes. (Lyotard, 1983:29-30) The diff erend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible. This state is signalled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling: "One cannot find the words," etc. A lot of searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the diff erend disclosed by the feeling, unless one wants this differend to smothered right away in a litigation and for the alarm sounded by the feeling to have been useless. What is at stake in literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them. (Lyotard,1988:13)

Adorno himself redefines and delimits an ethical

aesthetic of Auschwitz in Negative Dialectics when he

15

states that,

[p]erennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. (1973:362}

In his clarification of his subject-position regarding ways

of speaking about Auschwitz, that is, responses other than

· silence as if referring to poet Paul Celan' s poetic

language-at-the-limits - Adorno concedes that it is, in the

final count, artistic response alone, such as that

represented by the literary text, which can adequately

approach the subject of the Shoah.

TRUTH/TRUTHFULNESS/AUTHENTICITY: APPROACHES TO MEANING

Delbo's texts assume particular importance when read

as critical responses to contemporary theoretical

approaches to Auschwitz. Read in the original French, the

phrase, "Auschwitz et Apres" sets up a multiplicity of

different, often contradictory, readings which are

reflected in discussions of representation and historical

memory. As "Auschwitz ... et apres?", the phrase becomes

a construct which in its ironising, open-ended

interrogative structure, continuously problematises itself

as historical referent. As such the title of the trilogy

announces its own subverting instability and introduces the

ensuing conflation of discursive categories of truth

(historical/juridical discourse) and verisimilitude

(imaginative/literary discourse} in the narration of

experience in extremis. Indeed, the very first page of

written text in Aucun de nous ne reviendra, an epigraph,

echoes this reading of the trilogy's title, plunging the

16

testimony into uncertainty: "Aujourd' hui, je ne suis pas

sure que ce que j 1 ai ecrit soit vrai. Je suis sure que

c'est veridique." (1970a) (Nowadays, I am not certain that

what I have written is true, but I am certain that it

happened/is authentic.) The French text employs the words

verite (truth} and veridique (meaning both authentic and

truthful in French) and places the epigraph on an

unnumbered page in order to highlight the problematic of

representation and historical truth in survivor narrative.

The epigraph encapsulates the interplay between truth,

reality and verisimilitude in representation. This

formulation is a warning that what follows places the

witness and her testimony at a the threshold of crisis. It

also highlights the essential paradox which underpins both

the discursivity of the "fact 11 of Auschwitz and the process

of bearing witness, as a survivor to Auschwitz, a paradox

which is played out in the narrative itself.

The conflation of narrative categories in survivor

narrative underlines the effects of trauma on memory and,

by. extension, on the narration of memory. This collapse or

overlap of narrative categories also underlines the ways

that narrating memory are influenced by those factors which

shape the survivor for it is at the point of overlap of

imaginative and historical discourse that these factors

come to be revealed. From the title, and followed by the

texts themselves, the survivor 1 s essential dilemma emerges

which demands the addressee to persistently re-evaluate

categories and notions of historical discourse, fictional

or imaginative discourse and historical truth. Delbo' s

narratives cannot be committed to a master narrative of

historical certainty and yet, it is precisely the survival

of such a certainty to which they testify. Indeed, as

Delbo' s trilogy will demonstrate, survivor testimony is

constructed as one which is unable to reach closure in its

perpetual speaking of unspeakability, of fragmentation. As

17

such, Shoah survivor narrative is constructed

ambivalent, presenting itself as self-doubting,

sometimes, even contradictory.

as

and

Testimony which, emerges from ambiguity, disbelief,

doubt and paradox is problematic not least because it

challenges the consensual contract implicit in historical

narration, its modes of representation and its reception.

As Jean-Fram;:ois Lyotard reminds us, the empirical or

objective "authentication" of historical evidence presented

by survivor testimony is subverted by the very nature of

the event of the Shoah. {1983:16) To be an "eye-witness" to

the gas chambers and crematoria is a contradiction in

terms, people cannot witness their own death. Lyotard's

intention is to demonstrate the absurdity of the logic

implicit in Holocaust revisionist "historian", Faurisson's

syllogistic arguments which ignore the referential reality

of Auschwitz (1983:16)

The question which Delbo's trilogy raises, is how do

we think through an event where all terms of reference

become relative, unverifiable and hence, disputed,

contended?

difficult

The title of the trilogy then, raises the

and important question of what ethical

considerations can provide the conceptual limitations to

responsible scholarship of the Holocaust? Lyotard seems to

suggest that scholars have to investigate innovative

epistemologies in order to approach Auschwitz. In order to

do this it is necessary, he writes, that the historian,

[ ••• J rompe avec avec le monopole consenti au regime cogni tif des phrases sur l'histoire, et s'aventure a preter l'oreille a ce qui n'est pas presentable dans les regles de la connaissance. Toute realite comporte cette exigence pour autant qu'elle comporte des sens inconnus possibles. Auschwitz est la plus reelle des realites a cet egard. Son nom marque les conf ins ou la connaissance

'

18

historique voit sa competence recusee. Il ne s'ensuit pas qu'on entre dans le non-sens. L' alternative n 'est pas : OU la signification etablie par la science, ou 1 1 absurdi te, mystique comprise [ ... ]. (Lyotard, 1983:92) [ ••• J break with the monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases, and he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge. Every reality entails this exigency insofar as it entails possible unknown senses. Auschwitz is the most real of realities in this respect. Its name marks the confines wherein historical knowledge sees its competence impugned. It does not follow from that one falls into non-sense. The alternative is not: either the signification that learning [science} establishes, or absurdity, be it of the mystical kind [ ... J. (Lyotard, 198:57-58)

Saul Friedlander soberly reminds us that

fragmentation of meanings generated

postmodernist reading strategies can

understandings of Auschwitz. As he puts it,

the "playful"

by certain

trivialise

[ ... ] it is precisely the "Final Solution" which allows postmodernist thinking to question the validity of any totalizing view of history, of any reference to a definable metadiscourse, thus opening the way for a multiplicity of equally valid approaches. This very multiplicity, however, may lead to any aesthetic fantasy and one again runs counter to the need for establishing a stable truth as far as this past is concerned. (1992:5)

Unchecked by ethical obligations and historical truths,

19

such readings can relativise the Holocaust and key into the

ideological narratives .of negationist and denialist

discourse. This brings us to the converse or counter-

reading of the trilogy's title as "Auschwitz .... so what?" 4

which resonates in revisionist and denialist discourses

which, in seizing upon the essential dilemma inherent in

survivor testimony claim that the event must be, by logical

extension, untrue because unverifiable. {Davidovicz, 1981;

Vidal-Naquet, 1992; Fresco, 1994)

Ultimately the phrase points to the essential futility

of the experience which resists integration in human

cognitive systems and, hence, resists all assignment of

meaning. This understanding pre-empts the title of the

second volume, Une Connaissance Inutile, "A useless or

futile knowledge". The trilogy's title, read in the context

of the title of this volume generates speculation as to the

futility of bearing such a knowledge. Lifted off a phrase

in a Camus' notebook {Langer, 1978:202) the original French

text clearly articulates the difference between knowledge

and cognition. Hence, the etymological formation of

"connaissance" points, to cognition and the cognitive

processes, as opposed to 11 savoir11 which signifies

knowledge or, according to the Larousse, Dictionnaire de la

langue fran<;aise, "[l'e]nsemble des connaissances acquises

par l'etude". Thus the futility or senselessness of the

Shoah qualifies both its knowability as well as its

resistance to assimilation. Whether Auschwitz can be

"known", that is, whether the survivor/witness, using

available resources of language and cognitive structures,

can make Auschwitz knowable, is one of the underpinning

questions of all Shoah narrative. The question of

knowledge raised by the title of this second volume frames

4 In colloquial French, a statement which is followed by the question "et apres ? 11 translates, into English, as the dismissive "so what?".

20

the epistemological problematic which Auschwitz poses by

constructing the narrative as a sustained meditation of

interpersonal, historical and intertextual relationships in

order to explore the representational resistance of

Auschwitz.

If Auschwitz has become an important reference point

in contemporary debates on the role of memory in culture,

religious studies, philosophy and historiography, the third

volume evokes the disembodied bearers of that memory, the

survivors themselves. Through a series of conversations,

interviews, anecdotes, meditations in prose and poetry,

this third and final volume, entitled, Mesure de nos Jours

(Measure of our Days) , symbolically offers the survivor the

last word in his/her appraisal of the post-Auschwitz

condition. This volume presents the survivor as different

to those survivors represented in the heroic narratives of

resistance, survival, and healing/ integration. This serves

as an important reminder that the ways in which memory is

appropriated in collective representations of the past

often dispossess the survivor of the experience which they

have survived, threatening, once again, to silence them.

By invoking the survivor as doomed-to-survive Mesure de nos

Jours debunks many popular theories of survival of limit­

experiences and received notions of healing through telling

the story, through closure. Having already contested the

limits of narrative categories, the text's presentation of

the doomed-to-survive survivor challenges the addressee's

expectations of a teleological narrative, of a cathartic

engagement with the text and its internal logic.

21

III. AUSCHWITZ MEMORY: BODIES/BORDERS/BOUNDARIES

Central to this trilogy's preoccupation with

representation both of the survivor and of the Auschwitz

past is the way in which memory is individually

articulated, narrated and received. The very act of

ordering memory as a structured narrative, oral or written,

is an act of editing. (Todorov, 1993; Langer, 1988) The

sequence of images and events, the privileging of certain

memories over others, the ways that generation, gender,

culture, language, ethnicity and political conviction as

well as trauma, grief, guilt and fear collectively shape

memories, its sublimations and amnesiac lacunae (Grunebaum­

Ralph, 1996:17). Since the act of recollecting is one of

ordering and selecting, of forgetting as well as

remembering and of editing the way that something is

remembered, Memory's impulse is, by extension, revisionist

(Robbins, forthcoming) . Thus, personal memory and the

narratives appropriated by collective memory suture the

lacunary silences into a seamless, unproblematic Memory, a

gesture which is both revisioning as well as anti­

Revisionist. It is important, however, to examine how the

formalisation of memory in survivor narrative manifests,

through its structural organisation, self-doubt, self­

conscious alienation and silence regarding its own status

as testimony and, importantly, its historical authenticity.

This concern is clearly demonstrated by the refrain of 11 !

was there, I saw with my own eyes and still, I could not

believe what I saw" expressed in so many Holocaust survivor

testimonies (oral and written) . This sentiment draws on

the credibility of the eye-witness's empirical truth-claim,

central to the establishment of a legalistic and juridical

narrative of events, at the same time as it suggests that

central to the nature of the Holocaust is a resistance to

its cognitive assimilation.

22

Since individual memories are directly implicated in

questions of representation in survivor narrative it would

be helpful to turn, firstly, to one of Delbo's later texts,

La memoire et les Jours (1995) (Memory and Days), where she

discusses the operations of memory and of Holocaust

survivor memory in particular. This discussion of memory,

its discontinuities and disruptions, will be read back to

the trilogy as a fulcrum around which my interpretative

approaches to the texts will turn.

It is important to consider Delbo' s discussion of

memory in the context of the moment in which she publishes

her text. La memoire et les Jours appears in 1995, fifty

years after Delbo has been liberated from Ravensbruck.

Publication takes place in an era of ageing survivors,

against the backdrop of an increase in revisionist and

denialist 'narratives as well as an explosion of

publications, films, monuments, commemorations of the

Holocaust as it is increasingly com.modified. As Auschwitz

replicates, in the mass media, it belongs to everyone and

it belongs to no-one. The past two decades could best be

described as an era which has witnessed the fragmentation

of the master-narrative of "The Holocaust" the

dispersion of the meanings of the Auschwitz experience into

contested and competing narratives. {Friedlander, 1993;

Hartman, 1994; Stier, 1996) And yet the multiplication of

narratives of memory has witnessed new narratives of

amnesia. Thus, the beginning of the Historikerstreit (the

historian's debate) in Germany in 1986 and American

president, Ronald Reagan's controversial memorial visit to

SS graves at Bitburg cemetery, are two examples which stand

out as symptomatic of the historical relativisation which

precipitates the explosion of competing Holocaust

narratives onto the scene.

The survivor's text emerges at a time when debates on

normalisation, historicisation and historical relativism in

23

representations of the Holocaust and of memory on the

academic and cultural scene could be seen to invalidate the

survivor's experience of Auschwitz through multiple

appropriations of the individual experience.

Delbo's preoccupation with memory and its contexts of

expression, reflected in the title of the text, needs then

to be examined in the context of these challenges to

essentialist narratives of Holocaust memory as well as to

revisionist and denialist negations of the Holocaust. A

conceptualisation of memory emerges, prefaced precisely as

an intention to "explain the inexplicable", in La memoire

et les Jours through the metaphor of a snake which

routinely sheds its skin:

Expliquer l'inexplicable. L'image du serpent qui laisse sa vieille peau pour en surgir, revetu d'une peau fraf che et luisante, peut venir a l'esprit. J'ai quitte a Auschwitz une peau usee elle sentait mauvais, cette peau - marquee de tous les coups qu'elle avait re9us, pour me retrouver habillee d'une belle peau propre, dans une mue moins rapide que celle du serpent, toutefois. {11) 5

Explaining the inexplicable. The image of the snake which emerges from its old skin, clothed in a fresh and shiny skin, comes to mind. I left behind, at Auschwitz, a used skin - it smelled bad, that skin marked by all the blows that it had received, to find myself dressed in a clean new skin, in a moulting which was, all the same, less quick than the snake's.

This biologically framed representation of memory betrays

an awareness of the problematics of the premises on which

5 All quotations from La Memoire et les jours, in this chapter, will be referenced by page number only.

24

memory is theorised, for, memory, like skin, must change

with time, it ages and alters just as its representations

and transmissions. As such, built into this metaphorical

conceptualisation of memory is a self-reflectiveness, an

element of doubt which is a fundamental component of both

memory and its praxis and, hence, the truth-claims of the

survivor-as-witness. It is important to recall that, in a

discussion dealing with the dynamics of memory and the body

as a site of memory, the body has historically been figured

as a key trope in the representations of immutable

difference constructed by biological/scientific race

discourse of late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth

century Western Europe, specifically in Germany and France.

As a political prisoner of the Third Reich, Charlotte Delbo

would know how this discourse functions as a marker

singling out the different prisoner groups/strata in the

concentration camp for different treatment. In addition,

she would be aware of the function of this discourse in the

carrying out of genocide against Jewish and Gypsy

populations.

Both the snake and its shed skin bear the trace of the

other as a "memory" , by virtue of this previous organic

embeddedness. Just as the snake's skin falls away from the

snake, the survivor emerges from the Auschwitz experience.

Auschwitz "falls away" like the dead skin, yet unlike the

snake it remains wrapped around the survivor, separated,

detached but enclosing. By illustrating how the new and

old skins of the snake metaphorically represent the

dynamics of memory and of remembering, Delbo presents the

traces of Auschwitz and its memory as a bodily inscription,

an impression in flesh, an embodied memory. In this way

the body becomes the symbolic locus for conceptualising the

materiality of memory and its referential operations in

25

textual, cultural and commemorative practices6• In this

way, "disembodying" Holocaust narratives of a collective,

unsutured memory are personalised and reappropriated by the

victims and survivors.

The metaphor continues to describe how the snake's

shed skin retains its "memory", that is, the trace of the

snake, who, meanwhile, retains the memory of the skin

through which it has passed and through which it will once

again pass precisely because the process of shedding skin

is a returning, ritualising occurrence. By gesturing to

the way that the image of shed skin recalls the snake, the

metaphor calls our attention to the metonymic operation of

both the trope with which Auschwitz memory is figured as

well as of memory itself. In this way, we are reminded

that the representations and transmissions of memory can

only rely on metonymic tropes in order to represent the

subject remembered (or forgotten), in order to function as

memorial or historical narratives.

By referring to the process of sloughing, shedding,

fading and disappearing skin, the metaphor explicitly sets

up a temporal distinction which determines the visibility

of the material traces of memory. In this way, memory as

the faculty of recalling past experiences, is located,

through the shedding skin metaphor, as a spacio-temporal

construct. Thus, the less temporally immediate the Lager

becomes for the (ageing) survivor, the less the survivor's

skin retains the visible imprint of its submission to the

Lager. The more the trace itself becomes absent the more

Memory is charged with the responsibility of

"authentically" signing or signposting the past. It would

follow, then, that immediately after the survivor's return,

the body which returns from Auschwitz (like the snake's old

skin) bears the visible -and in the case of tattoos,

6 This study, however, focuses only on textual representation and narration of memory.

26

indelible - traces of the camp. This temporal distinction,

predicated on the fading of traces over the passing of

time, highlights Delbo' s concern with the way in which

memory facilitates the transposition of the materiality of

an ~vent to its representation in narrative as historical.

I would also suggest that Delbo's insistence on the

presence of the "invisible" trace of trauma functions as a

veiled gesture to the silences and dislocations within

survivor narratives as sites of these absent traces.

The significance of the site of the body, figured by

the metaphor of the skin, in theorising memory impacts on

discussions concerning the survival of limit-experiences

and must be more closely examined. By comparing the

snake's skin to that of the survivor's and then by

employing the snake's skin as a metaphor for the dynamics

of memory, Delbo conflates the faculty of recall with the

flesh of the survivor, powerfully underlining the present

absence of those who did not return, as well as evoking the

altered, marked and damaged corporeality of those who did.

Following the description of the snake shedding its skin,

Delbo suggests that the flesh is a site inscribed with a

memory of the senses, those receptors at the somatic

boundaries. This recall of experience through sensation

or impression on the senses, is conceptually clarified

further When it iS defined aS II la memoire prOfOnde 11

(13) (deep memory) and placed in opposition to and

differentiated from "la memo ire ordinaire" ( 13) (common

memory), 7 the faculty of recall which resides in the

intellect and, therefore, in language. Deep memory recalls

the sensory imprint of the camp:

A Birkenau, la pluie faisait ressortir

7 Both the translation of la memoire profonde as deep memory and la memoire ordinaire as common memory are Lawrence Langer's translations of Delbo's concepts of memory (1978)

27

l'odeur de diarrhee. C'est l'odeur la plus plus fetide que je connaisse. A Birkenau, la pluie rabattai t sur le camp, sur nous, la suie des crematoires et l 'odeur de chair qui brule. Nous en etions impregnes. (11) At Birkenau, the rain brought out the odour of diarrhea. It is the most fetid odour that I know. At Birkenau, the rain beat down on the camp, onto us, the soot of the crematoria and the odour of flesh which was burning. We were impregnated with it.

The recurring imagery of skin in

sensations and disf igurations would

recollecting its

suggest that a

representation of memory, as a specifically sensory/sensual

faculty, as organic tissue, literally embeds the traces of

Auschwitz in the body and its sense organs. I will return

to this presentation· of memory as bodily /embodied

inscription further on in a demonstration of how this

presentation functions as a mandate for the survivor to

speak/testify on behalf of the dead.

TORTURED MEMORY: THE SURVIVOR AND THE TRUE WITNESS

Unlike the snake which separates and emerges from its

sloughed skin, Delbo suggests that the survivor remains

permanently enclosed by the ou~er layer of skin/memory and

does not emerge from that shed skin/memory. This fleshy

mask which has survived the camps, "impregnated" with the

"soot of the crematoria" is, according to Delbo, both "la

memoire et la peau de la memoire" (the memory and the skin

of the memory) which is neither shed nor renewed and

becomes a literally embodied memory of Auschwitz. (12 -13)

For ·literary critic Rachel Ertel, the body's traces as

testimony to Auschwitz are not symbolic but, rather,

immanently material and literally embodied. Thus, in a

28

discussion of Claude Lanzmann's film on Holocaust memory,

Shoah, she writes that

Apres Shoah, il nous arrivera devant un objet tres ordinaire -un train, un camion , devant un paysage serein, d'etre pris d'un frisson, d'un spasme. Ce sera, dans notre corps, la memoire du genocide. (Ertel, 1990:54) 8

After Shoah, faced with a very ordinary object - a train, a truck -, in front of a peaceful countryside, we will be shaken by a spasm or a shiver. This will be, in our bodies, the memory of the genocide.

Although Ertel's remarks refer to the body-as-witness to

genocide of a later generation of addressees, they resonate

powerfully in Delbo's description of the survivor's body as

living, organic memorial site, as both historical and

personal. Moreover, it is this presentation of the memory

of genocide inscribed on the body which endows the survivor

with the emmissarial function of witness.

As the enveloping impenetrable outer layer of

Auschwitz memory, la memoire profonde retains the

sensations and experiences of the Lager, intact and

unmediated, and is presented as being an impermeable

membrane which is separate and separating. As such deep

memory defines the survivor as Survivor and emerges as the

separating boundary between survivor and non-survivor. In

a development of the original snake's skin metaphor,

Delbo' s narrator in Mesure de nos Jours articulates the

boundaries of survivor identity as layers of memory which

are constructed as three successive masks. The face of

Survivor: tired, used-up, ruined; the face from Auschwitz:

alive, mobile; and a third face which covers over the

others: a "passe-partout" mask which engages with the

8 My translation

29

anxieties of a post-Auschwitz world. (1971:187) Referring

to her co-survivors, the narrator suggests that [s]ans

doute n'y a-t-il que nous qui voyions la verite de nos

camarades, sans doute n'y a-t-il que nous qui voyions leur

visage nu par en dessous [le masque]." (1971: 187) (no doubt

it is us alone who saw the truth in our comrades, no doubt

it is us alone who saw their naked face beneath [the

mask].) Here, the survivor is constructed as the bearer of

an incommunicable truth, embedded in the body as an

invisible or esoteric mark whose presence functions as the

dead victim's proxy to tell the story.

By locating memory as an inscription on the body,

Delbo not only recalls the bearers of the true memory of

the camps, the literally effaced/defaced dead, she locates

in the very flesh of the survivor the traces of the dead

and, in doing so, the mandate to speak on their behalf.

This is illustrated in Aucun de nous ne Reviendra where the

narrator describes how men and women, who work in the

drained marshes in springtime with sacks around their

wastes,

[ ... ] plangent la main dans la poussiere d'os humains qu'ils jettent a la volee en peinant sur les sillons avec le vent qui leur renvoie la poussiere au visage et le soir ils sont tout blancs, des rides marques par la sueur qui a coule sur la poussiere. (1970a:19) [ .. . ] sink their hands into the human bone meal which they spread in handfuls above the furrows with the wind which blows the dust back into their faces and at night they are all white, lines marked by the sweat which has trickled through the dust.

Cinders of human remains trace the stories written on the

very faces of the survivors.

30

Many survivors, writers, historians and philosophers

have reiterated that the true witness to the Auschwitz

experience are those who did not return from it. Thus, in

The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi insists on the

distinction between the "true witnesses", the drowned or

those who died, and the saved, those who survived:

I must repeat - we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion, of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the 1 Muslims', the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception. (1989:63-64)

Thus, the representation of memory as body empowers the

narrative to bear collective witness on behalf of the dead

whose absent presences are "impregnated" in the narration

as the "soot of the crematoria".

REMEMBERING THE BODY'S EFFACEMENT

Re-presenting, re-inscribing the remnants of bodies,

Delbo' s conceptualisation of memory represents a post­

Auschwitz reclamation or recovery of the body whose

hegemonical boundaries have been transgressed in the Lager,

by the Lager. Indeed Jean Amery's proposition (1986:21-40)

that the violation of the corporeal boundaries of the body

- in systematic torture - was fundamental to the raison

31

d I etre of National Socialist ideology is precisely the

recognition of "wiping out" by assaulting the body: the

individual is rendered "invisible"/powerless and stripped

of potent will through the transgression/penetr~tion of

that somatic frontier, the skin, in the first blow of

torture.

If the first moment of torture represents the

unrecuperable sovereignty of the body and, so, of the

individual as Other, then the concentration camp represents

the systematic and progressive effacement of the entire

body's presence prior to its biological death. 9

I would suggest that the significance of the skin as

trope to figure memory is underscored further if we

consider that in the concentration camps the transgression

or blurring of the body's boundaries is directly linked to

the process of humiliation, degradation and dehumanisation

of the prisoner. The individual's identity, indeed, the

very notions of individuality and identity/identification

are powerfully renegotiated in the concentrationary

uni verse. For those deportees who were not immediately

sent to the gas chambers following arrival in the death

camps the shaving of hair on the head and entire body, the

tattooing of numbers as identification and delousing

treatments signify the beginning of a systematic process

whereby the physical signs of humanness are dismantled

through the negation, the desacralisation, of the body and

its presence in the camp. Thus, standing in the camp

yard, the first order given to the newly arrived prisoner,

prior to shaving, classifying, and tattooing, is to

undress, to expose the naked skin, to be stripped of the

first sign of "human" social identity. This "coercion of

nudity" (Levi, 1989: 90) dehumanises through recurrence. As

9 Amery speaks of torture as a system where the tortured is an extension of the will of the torturer and that the torturer experiences her/his subjectivity as "expanded into the body" of the tortured (35)

32

Primo Levi points out, in the Lager "shaving was total and

weekly; public and collective nudity was a recurrent

condition, typical and laden with significance." (1989:90)

Through the systematisation, ritualisation of deprivation,

depravation, transgression of and assault to the body's

presence, the physical markers of individual identity are

obliterated and conventional terms of identification are

defamiliarised, subverted.

The image of the Musulman, the walking dead,

identified by their haunting/haunted, gaunt faces, lifeless

eyes, emaciated bodies and automaton-like movements stands

out as a symbolic refrain of the body's obliteration, the

effacement of the material self prior to physiological or

clinical death in the camps.

As a recurring figure in survivor accounts, the

Musulman is represented as possessing neither an identity

nor a name, effectively constructed as embodied memory of

effacement. Thus, Delbo' s narrator describes the movements

of such a woman as " [u]ne danse de mecanique. Un squelette

de femme qui danse." (1970a:45) (a mechanical dance. A

dancing skeleton of a woman.) Importantly, both the

identity as well as the gender of the woman are erased and

as the narration of her robotic dance progresses the

narrator speculates as to whether she is"[ ... ] une de ces

vieilles folles qui font peur aux enfants dans les squares.

C'est une femme jeune, une jeune fille presque." (1970a:43)

(one of these crazy old ladies who frighten children in

parks. She is a young woman, a young girl almost.) In the

following paragraph the same woman is

[ ••• J enveloppe dans une couverture, un enfant, un gar9onnet. Une tete rasee tres petite, un visage OU saillent les machoires et l'arcade sourcilliere. Pieds nus, il sautille sans arret [ . .. J. Il veut agi ter les bras aussi pour se rechauffer. La couverture s'ecarte. C'est un femme. Un squelette de femme. Elle est nue. (1970a:44-45) [ ••• J wrapped in a blanket, a child, a little

33

boy. A tiny, shaven head, a face whose jaws and brow stand out. Barefoot, he jumps without stopping. He also wants to wave his arms in order to stay warm. The blanket falls open. It is a woman. The skeleton of a woman. She is nude.

By transexualising the woman from old woman, young girl,

small boy and young woman, the narrative effectively

constructs the Musulman as the essential witness-as­

effaced-memory, encompassing those "walking dead" who were

literally disfigured by emaciation, disease and torture as

well as the Jewish deportees who passed from the camps'

station platforms directly to the gas chambers: the old,

the children, the sick and frail and the pregnant women.

DISMEMBERED BODIES, DISPLACED MEMORIES

After biological death, bodies are incinerated,

altered as human remains. It is after death that the body

becomes truly effaced as body, as memory of a body,

stripped of its "human" referentiality, and commodified as

"material" in a process of exchange whereby the

dismemberment/re-memberment of body parts effectively

erases memory by transposing another identity onto those

remains. 10 The identity of the body is recalled, not as

the death of a person, but as a commodified object. ·This

would, in effect, bring about a double displacement of

memory for the dismemberment/re-memberment of body parts

simultaneously covers over the body's identity as a dead

person as well as the history of how and why the person

died.

Comrnodif ication of body parts as a strategy which

displaces memory is clearly illustrated when Delbo's

10 In the language of the Nazi bureaucracy the term employed for human remains is Materiel.

34

narrator describes how in Auschwitz [ ... ] au printemps des

hommes et des femmes repandent les cendres sur les marais

asseches pour la premiere fois laboures et f ertilisent le

sol avec du phosphate humain [,] (1970a:l8), ([ ... ] in the

spring men and women scatter the ashes over the marshes,

drained and ploughed for the first time, and fertilise the

soil with human phosphate) . In a perversion of burial

rites as memorial practice the use of human remains as

fertiliser effectively replaces/re-places the memory of the

victims through a linguistic and material exchange which

literally disperses the memory of the victims. Primo Levi

supplements Delbo's narration of the obliteration of victim

memory with a literal image of walking over the remains of

the victim when he notes that:

[t]he human ashes coming from the crematoria, tons daily, were easily recognised as such, because they of ten contained teeth or vertebrae. Nevertheless, they were employed for several purposes: as fill for swamp lands, as thermal insulation between the walls of wooden buildings. as phosphate fertiliser: and especially notable, they were used instead of gravel to cover the paths of the SS village located near the camp. I couldn't say whether out of pure callousness or because, due to its origins, it was regarded as material

. to be trampled on. (Levi, 1989, p.100)

The use of human hair for upholstering furniture and

skin for making lampshades underscore how the

dismemberment of the body represents the literal

dismantling of the material vestiges of individual humanity

as such. These images of the dismemberment (and

reconstitution in different form) of human remains are

central to many representations of the Holocaust. These

images are powerfully evoked by Alain Resnais and Jean

Cayrol in their famous cinematic indictment of fascism -

35

essentially symbolised, in their opinion, by the Nazi

concentration camp system in their film, Nuit et

Brouillard. 11 The notion of dismantled humanity,

articulated in the dismemberment and reconstitution of the

body as 11 stuff" is best summed up by Theodor Adorno who

states that 11 in the concentration camps it is no longer an

individual who died, but a specimen [ ... ] 11• (Adorno,

1973:362)

COLLAPSING MEMORIES, NARRATING MEMORIES

The identification of and distinction between the two

memories which Delbo makes is central to the narrative

project itself for deep memory

[ ... ] garde les sensations, les empreintes physiques. C' est la memoire des sens. Car ce ne sont pas les mots qui sont gonfles de charge emotionnelle. Sinon, quelqu'un qui a ete torture par la soif pendant des semaines ne pourrai t pl us j amais dire: «J' ai soif. Faisons une tasse de the.» Le mot aussi s'est dedouble. {14) [ ... ] retains the sensations, the physical imprints. This is the memory of the senses. For it is not the words which are filled with emotional charge. Otherwise, someone who had been tortured by thirst for weeks on end would never again be able to say, "I am thirsty. Let's make a cup of tea. 11 The word itself has also split.

11 This film performs a simultaneous effacement of the memory of the dismembered Jewish body. We are reminded that, on the hierarchy of the camps, "the Jews are at the very bottom. Then come the victims of the Night and Fog Decree, political prisoners, common criminals, and, above them, the Kapo; still higher is the SS, and highest of all, the Commandant." {Avisar, 1988: 8) The film's title effectively silences the memory of those camp inmates who were "lower" on the hierarchy of the camps. Moreover, Jewish genocide is not specifically mentioned in the film, eliding the murder of the Jews into a universalised cinematic narrative of the Holocaust.

36

Through this operation of a linguistic truncation which

enacts a separation between the survivor, the Auschwitz

experience and its return in deep memory, Delbo suggests

that a primary memory which defies historicisation and

resists narrativisation can be identified in survivor

narrative. Thus, la memoire profonde comes to represent a

perpetual present time of the Lager, what literary critic

Lawrence Langer calls a "disintegrating time". (1994: 72)

Indeed, Eli Wiesel presents the anti-narrativising movement

of la memoire profonde as an imploding temporality when he

notes that "Auschwitz is the death of time, the end of

creation [ ... ] " (Wiesel, 1978: 198) . Thus, the very temporal

structure of deep memory represents an anti-historicising

current which challenges the return or the "after

Auschwitz" life-world of the survivor, by continuously

threatening to plunge the survivor into the Lager. Hence,

when Delbo's survivor/narrator acknowledges that when deep

memory unexpectedly and spontaneously punctures her

reconstructed uni verse she fears that 11 le camp me rattrape"

(13) (the camp catches me again). Through its undistilled

virtualisation of the horror and trauma of the camp

experience, the sensory memory which is la memoire

profonde, replaces the sensation itself and re-places the

survivor back in the camp. The motif of the recurring

dream, narrated, in Mesure de nos Jours, functions, as we

will see further on, as a narrative of threatened re­

placement. Here, we are presented with a shifting from

representation to reality which emerges when the

distantiating constructs of common memory are no longer in

place such as in dreams, delirium, ill-health, moments of

mental/emotional "collapse". Illustrating this point, we

turn to the same text where a Jewish survivor, Ida,

narrates, her survival, return and reconstructed life-world

as a mirror of "normality". She describes how, after her

having returned and discovered that she is the sole

37

remaining member of her entire family, she marries and has

a child. Just when it appears that everything is going

well, she describes how an unforeseen and insurmountable

anxiety grips her and threatens to destroy her replicated

life-world. "Ma gorge s'etranglait, ma poitrine etait

ecrasee dans un cerceau de fer, mon coeur m'etouffait. Je

me suis mise a crier de terreur", she tells.us (1971:19).

(My throat was being strangled, my chest was crushed by a

hoop of iron, my heart was smothering me. I began to shout

in terror.) She is hospitalised, "treated" and returns home

to discover that the original anguish takes the form of a

split consciousness. "Quand j 'ai repris mes esprits, j 'ai

eu un choc", (When I returned to my senses, I got a fright)

she continues (1971:119). At this point Ida/the narrator

brackets her statement of shock with a discovery, in direct

speech and in the present tense, enacting, in turn, a

return to the camp which is narrated as a shift in temporal

consciousness:

<<Pourquoi suis-je ici? Qu'est-ce que je fais ici? Je suis enfermee. On va me garder enf ermee. » J' ai eu peur. Attendre et laisser passer l'occasion, non. Je devais fuir. Vite. En un clin d'oeil ma decision etait prise. J'ai enfile ma robe de chambre et j'ai saute par la fenetre. [ ... J J'avais voulu fuir. D'ailleurs, c'est difficile a expliquer. J'etais double et je ne parvenais pas a reunir mes doubles. (1971:119-120) "Why am I here? What am I doing here? I am locked up. I will be kept locked up." Should I wait and let the opportunity pass? No. I had to flee. Quickly. In a wink my decision was made. I took off my dressing-gown and I jumped out of the window. [ ... ] I had wanted to flee. Besides. it is difficult to explain. I was double and I did not manage to bring my doubles together.

38

Deep memory and the language which represents it

precipitates the expression of both a re-placement of the

narrator in the camp and her threatened subjectivity. By

projecting the narrator back to the camp, the narration of

deep memory threatens the very fabric of the survivor's

reconstructed univers·e, metaphorically signified by the

"dressing-gown", and explodes existing interpretative and

narrative frameworks ("I jumped out of the window").

The trilogy presents survivors in varying stages of

struggle with their memories. Indeed the very notion of a

survival narrative, a traditionally heroic genre of

narrative, is subverted by these representations of

survival as perpetually doomed consciousness. Thus, when

the division between deep and common memory is blurred, the

texts present survival as sustained (as opposed to post-)

emotional, psychological and emotional trauma, a perpetual

suffering of debilitating and pathological illness.

Indeed, certain vignettes in Mesure de nos Jours narrate

anamnesis precisely as amnesia. However, when the

boundaries of separation which are set up by the clear

distinction and opposition between the two memories Delbo's

survivor/narrator is presented as ontologically different,

split, from the prisoner-self in Auschwitz:

Au contraire de ceux dont la vie s'est arretee au seuil du retour, qui depuis vi vent en survie, moi j 'ai le sentiment que celle qui etait au camp, ce n'est pas moi, ce n'est pas la personne qui est la, en face de vous. Non, c'est trap incroyable. Et tout ce qui est arrive a cette autre, celle d 'Auschwitz ne me gene pas, ne se mele pas de ma vie. Comme si ce n 'etai t pas moi du tout. Sans cette coupure, je n'aurais pas pu revivre. (13) As opposed to those whose life stopped at the threshold of the return, who 1 i ve · as survivors, I have the impression that the person who was in the camp is nqt me, she is not the person who is there, in front of you. No that is too

39

unbelievable/incredible. And everything that happened to this other, that person at Auschwitz, does not trouble me, does not become mixed up with my life. As if she was not me at all. Without this cut, I would not be able to live again.

Other anecdotal presentations of survivors manifest

the survivor as profoundly anguished, awaiting the release

offered by death and unable to distinguish between the self

in Auschwitz and the survivor. Thus, Mado concludes in

Mesure de nos Jours (1971), that since all her comrades who

died at Auschwitz were stronger and more resolved than her,

she, by sheer logic, could not have survived in the sense

of being animated by any signs of life other than

physiological. Her narration presents survival as a post­

Auschwitz, pre-death purgatory. Thus, punctuating her

narration as evidence to this suspended state of limbo is

the refrain "Je ne suis pas vivante" (I am not

alive/living) (1971) Clearly then, by thinking through a

morphology of personal memory, Delbo suggests that both

survival and memory is irreducible, subjective and

resistant to essentialising explanations.

COMMON MEMORY, HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND NARRATING

RUPTURE

Common memory is described as an "external" memory

which resides in the intellect, in thought and in language.

As such, it would seem that common memory is the faculty of

recall which enacts the spacio-temporal distanciation

between the survivor and the Lager, the consciousness of

which permits a narration, however problematic that

narration may be. Common memory is therefore constituted

by and through a historical consciousness which enables a

speaking of Auschwitz. Hence, " [ .. J lorsque je vous parle

40

d'Auschwitz ce n'est pas de la memoire profonde que

viennent mes paroles. Les paroles viennent de la memoire

externe, si je puis dire, la memoire intellectuelle, la

memoire de la pensee. II (14) ( [ ... ] when I speak to you

about Auschwitz my words do not come from deep memory. The

words come from external memory, so to speak, intellectual

memory, memory of thought.) Clearly, the two memories of

the survivor emerge as parallel 'sites of recall which

constitute opposing modalities of spacio-temporal

consciousness. While common memory facilitates speaking,

enabling return, deep memory threatens integrity.

It is significant that Delbo locates la memoire

ordinaire in the 11 external 11 or common space of language, of

intellect. This would imply that ordinary memory, while

challenging the boundaries of representability, can both

frame narration and be narrated. By narratabili ty of

ordinary memory, I mean that the survivor account is able

to be placed in a temporal framework whose linearity,

chronology or circularity bears out a consciousness of

historical time, time of narration, narrative time and the

discursive distance between these temporal modalities.

The organisation and temporal structuration of Delbo's

texts is significant regarding the narrativity of common

memory. The thematic treatment of Auschwitz is different

in each volume yet in all three texts the narrative is

structured through a series of narrative vignettes

interspersed with poetry in verse and prose. The

specifically anti-linear structure of the first and third

volumes presents a temporality which is neither progressive

nor chronological, manifesting a narration which

structurally represents common memory punctured by the

traumatising, collapsing moments which trace deep memory.

In Aucun de nous ne Reviendra, the narrator describes

a scene during morning roll-call at Auschwitz where she

watches a woman being killed by the dog of an SS guard.

She punctuates this narration with the comment that 11 [ ••• ]

41

maintenant je suis dans un cafe a ecrire cette histoire

car cela devient une histoire." (1970a:45) (now I am in a

cafe writing this story - for this is becoming a story) .

A little further on she notes that " [ ... ] nous restons

debout dans la neige. Immobiles dans la plaine immobile.

Et maintenant je suis dans un cafe a ecrire ceci."

(1970a:45) (we remain standing in the snow. Motionless on

the motionless plain. And now I am in a cafe writing ..

this.) The narration of the event breaks down, yet at the

faultlines of representation, the resources of common

memory which are invoked to narrate the collapse are the

constitutive terms of the narration itself. Thus, the

narrator signals the breakdown of the testimony by drawing

attention to its discursive framework: the becoming of a

story. By presenting the narration as "mere story" the

narrator succeeds in making visible the limits of "story­

telling" in narrating Auschwitz. Hence, the "story"

becomes the presentation of collapse of the narration whose

progression is interrupted by the compression signified by

the "motionlessness" of both temporal and spacial

consciousness which has emerged at this point.

Delbo's narratives are presented as shot through with ' the tension engendered between the impulse of two memories

one producing a narration; the other collapsing a

narration - which are present and continuously overlap,

and sometimes are mutually indistinguishable, in the

narrator/survivor's consciousness and in·the narrative. In

this way, the narration of Auschwitz proceeds through a

structure whose organisation imitates the effects of

massive trauma on the narration of memory.

Delbo' s notion of common memory seems to straddle

seemingly conflicting positions regarding debates on

communicability and representability of the Auschwitz

experience. Surviving the concentration camps and

consecrating a testimony as a specifically literary text

reveal Delbo's conviction that memory of the Shoah resides

42

in the trajectory of the literary text and its canonic

status in historical consciousness. Supporting Theodor

Adorno' s reformulated conviction that perhaps it only

artistic representation which, however limited, can respond

to Auschwitz, Delbo' s exploration of imaginative discourse

and its possibilities as an approach to historicisation and

transmission of the event of the Shoah raises important

questions regarding literary form and historical truth, or

more precisely, literary form as historical truth (White,

1978). In an interview with the French actuality magazine,

L'Express (1966), Delbo gestures to the resource offered by

common memory's idiom:

Certains ont dit que la deportation ne pouvait pas entrer dans la litterature, que c'etait trop terrible, que l'on n'avait pas le droit d'y toucher ... Dire ·9a, c'est diminuer la litterature, je crois qu 'el le est assez grande pour tout englober. Un ecrivain doit ecrire sur ce qui le touche. J'y suis allee, pourquoi n'aurais-je pas le droit d'ecrire la-dessus ce que j'ai envie d'ecrire? Il n'y a pas de mots pour le dire. Eh bien! vous n'avez qu'a en trouver rien ne doi t echapper au langage. Certain people have said that the deportation was not able to become literature, that it was too terrible, that no-one had the right to touch it ... To say that is to diminish literature, I believe that literature is big enough to encompass everything. A writer has to write what touches her/him. I went there, why shouldn't I have the right to write about whatever I feel like writing? No words can express it. Well then, you only have to find them - nothing has to escape language.

Delbo's statement is important in that it challenges

received notions of incommunicability. What her texts

43

reveal, rather, is a rendering immanent of something

indefinable, incommunicable, unnameable. Her narrative

strategy, echoed in this newspaper interview, proceeds from

a narration of fragments, of silences and interrupted

continuity, and yet, they do not disperse signification

into a Borgesian mirror of infinite word-play and endless

meaning. Coherent meaning is produced through the

narration of fragments which are underpinned by the very

referential reality named in the title of the trilogy:

Auschwitz and After. Thus, Delbo' s belief in the

inclusivity of literature, in literature's ability to

adequately present survival of and experience in the camps

suggests that the challenge to representation is not for

lack or poverty of resources within the literary

system/canon,

produced at

Delbo's common memory. Literature is

the faultlines of human experience and

imagination. If the faultlines are extended, or if human

experience is reconstituted along different faul tlines,

new imaginary and representational strategies must be

produced. In this way, Delbo suggests that it is the

creators and contributors of the literary and historical

canons who are charged with examining innovative

representational modes. By focusing on the role of the

artist, Delbo emphasises how it is the communicative

capacity of common memory's resources which underlies the

problematic representation and narration of the Auschwitz

experience. Shoshana Felman has persuasively argued that

testimonial narrative, which blurs the boundaries of

conventional narrative categories, responds to Delbo' s call

to explore new representational modes. (Felman & Laub,

1992)

It becomes evident that Delbo's conflation of memory

and skin is in itself a narration of memory whose enacted

remembrance becomes a powerful gesture of resistance which

negates the very essence of 'the Nazi aim: to erase every

trace of racially/genetically abhorrent existence and to

44

negate the very possibility of bearing witness to genocide,

that is, to erase the memory of the annihilation.

Illustrating this point clearly in his Poznan speech,

Heinrich Himmler refers to the Nazi genocidal endeavour as

being [ ... ] a page of glory in our history which has never

to be written and is never to be written [ ... ] ." 1 This

now famous reference to a never-to-be written history

refers simultaneously · to the Nazi enterprise of

extermination of target-groups: "Jews", "Gypsies",

"homosexuals", "mentally ill" (LaCapra, 1994: 88), to the

endeavour to ensure that no witnesses remained to testify

to that enterprise, and, finally to the resistance to

representation in language of those very events.

In a reference to Auschwitz, German philosopher Jurgen

Habermas hints at this notion of the unrepresentable in the

writing of a history of Auschwitz, of history after

Auschwitz, when he suggests that "Auschwitz has changed the

basis for the continuity of the conditions of life within

history and this not only in Germany". (Quoted in

Friedlander, 1993: 49) To speak, then, as a survivor of

Auschwitz, about Auschwitz is to edify resistance to the

effacement of history-as-memory.

45

CHAPTER II

AUCUN DE NOUS NE REVIENDRA 12

Garder le silence. Le silence ne se garde pas, il est sans egard pour l'oeuvre qui pretendrait le garder - il est l'exigence d'une attente qui n'a rien a attendre, d'un langage qui, se supposant totalite de discours, se depenserait d'un coup, se desunirait, se fragmenterait sans fin. (Maurice Bll!Jlcbot, L'Ecriture du Desastre, p.51)

I. SHATTERED/SHATTERING MEMORY: A PROGRAMME FOR REPRESENTATION

The first volume of the trilogy is Delbo/the

narrator's account of the first weeks in Auschwitz, but in

its fragmented form and unsettling style, this volume will

be read as the setting out of an aesthetic programme for

the representation of Holocaust memory and the silencing

ruptures of deep memory.

When the narrator of Aucun de nous ne Reviendra (None

of us will Return) says on the final numbered page of text

that " [ ... ] nous avons perdu la memoire I I aucun de nous ne

reviendra." ( 182) 13 ( [ ••• ] we have lost our memory. None of

us will return), she is suggesting that memory which has

been lost is obviously not the faculty of recollection

itself, but the medium of referential language which frames

a shattered and shattering remembering, which renders

fragmentation immanent. By examining the way in which

memory functions in narrative as its own subverting, self­

doubting counter-impulse we can understand how the

survivor, as a witness, perpetually finds her/himself on

the threshold of contradictory and paralysing injunctions

which problematise both memorialisation as well as the act

12 A first draft of this chapter was presented as a paper entitled, Charlotte Delbo: Language, crisis and identity after Auschwitz, at the "Literary Responses to the Holocaust" conference, University of Cape Town, 11-12 August, 1994.

13 All quotations from Aucun de nous ne reviendra, in this chapter, will be referenced by page number only.

\

46

of bearing witness.

A clue to understanding how the crisis of survival and

memory is articulated around language and identity is

provided by the title of this first volume. The "return"

to which the title, Aucun de nous ne Reviendra refers is

literally to the certainty of "life" from the probability

of death, a return to an integrated self which is presented

as a return to language but not as a return to "wholeness".

Return to language, in these texts, is understood as the

making visible, the uttering of the traces of fracture

represented by survival of limit-experiences. Thus, by

juxtaposing the notions of an integrated identity and a

hesitating language, the psychoanalytically framed

proposition that by narrating an event we come to "master"

or to possess it is demonstrated to be both authentic in

its unconditional validation of the survivor and the

survivor's testimony and invalid in its supposition that

telling, narrating necessarily precedes a healing of that

trauma. The relationship between the identity of the

survivor as a speaking subject and her /his return to

language is therefore interconnected and important in the

narration of this text.

By return to language I mean to both figurative and

literal referential language, inherent in Delbo's

definition of "common memory" which, until the watershed

trauma signified by Auschwitz, had been bound to the

historic or poetic reality which it represented.

Contemporary literary theory (for example, Barthes, 1972;

Kristeva, 1974; Foucault,· 1975; Lyotard, 1983; Foucault,

1975; Derrida, 1977) has demonstrated that the relationship

between language and the reality which it produces is

contingent and arbitrary and has been placed in a state of

conflict, ambiguity, and self-conscious irony. Thus, if we

understand language, in a post-Auschwitz world, as having

lost its "innocence", it is precisely this "idyllic" state

of language (Kofman, 1987 :23) to which none of us will

47

return.

THE DOUBLE-BIND OF REPRESENTATION

Central to an examination of Aucun de Nous ne

Reviendra is an analysis of how both the fragmentary nature

of memory as well as the dispersing nature of silence

impacts on the literary representation of the Auschwitz

experience in Delbo's trilogy. This examination is

preceded by a consideration of Gregory Bateson's theory of

the double-bind which will then be read back to the

survivor/narrator's "return to language" as a way of

representing, in the wake of massive trauma, the silences

of memory, or rather, memory as fragmentation.

The notion of the double-bind has evolved through

behavioural theory's formulation of a theoretical framework

for the study of .,schizophrenia. The most notable exponent

of the double-bind hypothesis has been Gregory Bateson

(1956) whose theorisation is based, significantly, on

communications analysis. The scene is set for the

hypothesis of the double-bind when the communication

pat terns derived from the theory of Logical Types

between mother and child break down and produce a

pathological reaction (in the child) whose most radical

manifestation of a pathology is schizophrenia. According

to Bateson's theory, the double-bind situation relies on a

series of contradictory injunctions, alternatively negative

and positive; verbal and non-verbal; literal and non­

literal, which place conflicting demands on the

addressee/ "victim" (sic) (Bateson, 1956: 253) . A tertiary

negative injunction prohibits the addressee from leaving

the space of conflict with the effect of paralysing the

potential for reaction. Thus, the addressee becomes

immobilised at the very threshold of response. Moreover,

the double-bind situation arises when the addressee of the

48

seemingly contradictory injunctions understands the

injunctions ~s literal when they are produced and intended

as metaphorical. By demonstrating how communication of the

message generates its own breach, Bateson shows how the

double-bind is constructed as a problem of language and

meaning.

The notion of the double-bind is a useful

interpretative tool in examining how Delbo's ruptured

narrations function as formal constituents which collapse

the possibility of both teleological narratives and linear

narrations. Fragmented memories, constructed as such in

response to massive trauma, are represented through the

very form which resists them. (Felman & Laub, 1992:57-74)

The double-bind therefore demonstrates how a point of

conflict upon which Delbo's narrative is contingent enacts

the very dilemma which it attempts to represent and which,

in turn, reflects the survivor/witness's struggle with

credibility and self-doubt· in post-Auschwitz narrative.

Hence, if we understand the formal features of the

narrative as resembling the structure of the double-bind

situation, Delbo's narratives aesthetically render the very

crisis or rupture which resist representation.

Delbo precedes the narration proper with an epigraph

on an unnumbered page: "Aujourd'hui, je ne suis pas sure

que ce que j'ai ecrit soit vrai. Je suis sure que c'est

veridique." (Today, I am not sure if what I have written is

true. I am certain that it is truthful/authentic.) Like

the epigraph at the beginning of the text the final page

of text is also unnumbered and bears one short sentence:

"Aucun de nous n 'aurai t du revenir." (None of us should

have returned.) By following and preceding the narrative

proper with these paratextual avertissements (warnings),

Delbo is constituting her narrative between a subjective

expression of doubt and an expression of disbelief which,

by subverting the forensic certainty of first-hand memory

signified by the narratorial status of survivor-witness,

49

highlights the conflicting and destabilising mechanisms

inherent in the very process which constructs narrative-as­

testimony. Thus, the narrative which is placed within

these paratextual parentheses has to be read in the light

of this problematisation of truth modalities raised by the

prologue and epilogue. In this way, Delbo seems to suggest

that the essence of post-Auschwitz narrative resides in a

non-closure where something remains both unsaid and '

unsayable. Geoffrey Hartman refers to this idea of the

unsayable when he invokes Jean-Frarn;:ois Lyotard's

suggestion that post-Auschwitz narrative must "present the

existence of the unpresentable" (Hartman, 1992:321).

SILENCE: DEEP MEMORY ON THE THRESHOLD OF TESTIMONY

In her book, Paroles Suffoquees (1987), dedicated to

her father who died in Auschwitz, Sara Kofman moves towards

a striking definition of what it means to write after

Auschwitz. Motivated by an ethical imperative that no

narrative (denoted by the French word "recit") is possible

after Auschwitz, Kofman's critique examines the possibility

of a post-Auschwitz aesthetics through her reading of

Maurice Blanchet' s L' Idylle (The Idyll) and Apres coup

(After the Event) . What is this ethical imperative?

Shoshana Felman suggests it is a demand that post-Auschwitz

narrative bears both the traces of rupture and negation

imposed by the Auschwitz experience with previously

immutable values represented by the Enlightenment legacy in

Western consciousness (Felman & Laub, 1992) . This means

that narrative qua narrative bears witness to the event of

Auschwitz, as well as to the traces of the contradictions

inherent in the process of bearing witness. In this way

the complexities of telling and writing engendered firstly

by the survivor/witness's claim to silence, and secondly by

the impulse to testify to the event witnessed, would be

50

underscored.

Finding no adequate rendering offered by the

distorting and limiting modes of representation and

experiencing a betrayal of the sanctity and magnitude of

the experience which only silence upholds, the survivor

resorts to being a silent witness. On the other hand, to

testify on behalf of the self and on behalf of the dead as

well as to validate the survivor's crossing from the fate

of Auschwitz to the arbitrary fate of life, impel the

survivor/witness to tell the experience. Articulation of

memory in Shoah survivor narrative, then, bears out

multiple dilemmas raised by this near-impossibility of

speaking about the event. As we have seen, the title to

the trilogy already evokes one of the essential dilemmas of

the survivor/witness, who find themselves at the threshold

of contradictory injunctions to remain silent in the face

of the unutterable as well as to bear witness for the dead

and returning self.

Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard outlines the ways in which

silence is implicated in the testimonial utterance when he

writes that,

Le silence ne signale pas quelle est l'instance niee, il signale qu'une ou des instances sont niees. Les survivapts se taisent, et l 'on peut entendre (1) que la situation en question (le cas) n'est pas l'affaire du destinataire (il n 'a pas la competence, ou il ne merite pas qu'on lui en par le, etc.) ,. ou (2) qu 'elle n'a pas eu lieu (c'est qu'entend Faurisson) / OU (3) qu'il n'y a rien a en dire (elle est insensee, inexprimable) ,. ou (4) que ce n 'est pas l'affaire des survivants d'en parler (ils n'en sont pas dignes, etc.). Ou plusieurs de ces negations ensemble. (Lyotard, 1983:31) Silence does not indicate which instance is denied, it signals the denial of one or more of the instances. The survivors remain

51

silent, and it can be understood 1) that the situation in question (the case) is not the addressee's business (he or she lacks the competence, or he or she is not worthy of being spoken to about it, etc.); or 2) that it never took place (this is what Faurisson understands); or 3) that there is nothing to say about it (the situation is senseless, inexpressible); or 4) that it is not the survivors' business to be talking about it (they are not worthy, etc . ) Or, several of these negations together.). (Lyotard, 1988:14)

Clearly then, the survivor/narrator desires to testify and

yet is unable to. Silence imprisons the survivor/narrator

at a crossroads of multiple contradictory injunctions: to

remain silent in the face of the unutterable for language

cannot adequately represent the memories; to speak and to

bear witness for the vanished and the dead as well as for

the returning/surviving self. Lyotard, however, goes

further by implicating the addressee, and by extension, the

reception of testimony, in the silencing of the survivor's

story, an important consideration which contests received

ideas regarding the historical silence of the survivor and

which will be examined further in Chapter Four.

It is precisely and only through language, the

survivor's resource of "common memory", that the telling of

the self and the telling of the dead after Auschwitz can be

narrated. Such a narration would necessarily separate the

self or the survivor/narrator from the dead, those "silent

others", and would therefore facilitate the survivor's

inscription of the self in the world of the living. In

this way the very narrative process of telling the story of

the dead, silenced anonymous - literally effaced - in the

context of their death save for their tattooed numbers,

becomes a mourning, that is, the ordering of an eulogizing

ritual whose enactment facilitates the speaking subject's

survival as a return to "wholeness" through language.

52

Besides facilitating this re-inscription of the

individual into the world of the living, telling erects a

memorial for the dead. Telling the story and remembering

the dead become the self-same act. This memorialising

function of testimony fulfils the survivor's self-imposed

mandate to return precisely in order to tell the stories of

the dead and so to inscribe them into a collective memory,

into a historical consciousness. In this way memorialising

embeds a ritualised/ritualising mourning, a eulogising

testimony into the survivor's testimony.

II. CRISIS OF NAMING: DYING EFFACES DEATH

At the beginning of the text, the question of

language, of an unsayable testimony, is constituted as a

crisis of naming. The narration of contested

representation as a crisis of naming disputes, in turn, the

proposition that the writing of death in Auschwitz can be

a eulogising inscription. In this way, the narrative defies

a rhe'toric of death at the same time as it edifies a

textual memorial for those who died.

When the train transports arrive at Auschwitz the

narrator suggests that the new arrivals

[ • •• J voudraient savoir ou ils sont. Ils ne savent pas que c 'est ici le centre de l'Europe. Ils cherchent la plaque de la gare. C'est une gare qui n'a pas de nom. (12) [ ... ] would 1 ike to know where they are. They do not know that this is the centre of Europe. They look for the name of the station. It is a station which has no name. A station which for them will never have a name.

Later, Auschwitz is described as a town which has no name.

By separating herself from the nameless "them", those who

53

will never return, who will never bear witness, the

narrator demonstrates the survivor/witness's concern with

the representation of unnameability. To name after

Auschwitz, then, is to speak about unnameability, in other

words, to bring into question the ways in which we think

about the world, the ways in which we name.

This problem of language and intelligibility resonates

throughout the narrative. Describing the scene of a dying

prisoner attempting to climb a snowbank in order to suck

some water from the snow and then, turning to her fellow

prisoners for help, we read that "[s]a main s'agite une

fois encore comme un cri - et· elle ne crie pas. Dans

quelle langue crierait-elle si elle criait?" (46-47) ( [h] er

hand waves once again like a cry - and she does not cry

out. In what language would she cry if she were to cry

out?) Only the body bears traces of the decipherable

signs of dying, of approaching death. Thus,

[ ... ] la mart se peint sur le visage, s'y plaque implacablement et il n'est pas besoin que nos regards se rencontrent pour que nous comprenions toutes en regardant Suzanne Rose qu 'elle va mourir, en regardant Mounette qu'elle va mourir. La mart est marquee a la peau callee aux pommettes, a la peau callee aux orbites, a la peau callee aux maxillaires. (107) [ ... ] death presents itself on the face, it announces itself implacably and there is not necessary that our glances meet for all of us to understand by looking at Suzanne Rose, that she is going to die, by looking at Mounette, that she is going to die. Death is traced on the skin clinging to the cheekbones, on the skin clinging to the eyesockets, on the skin clinging to the jawbones.

The repetition of "la peau" (the skin) serves to underline

how the body functions as the locus of the obliterating and

54

transfiguring violence perpetrated by the concentrationary

system against the individual. Moreover, I would suggest

that the repetition of "la peau" serves to enumerate the

material signs of death as a way to re-embody the dead in

the testimonial narrative. Significantly, in this

instance, re-embodying the dead is preceded by naming

those prisoners who bear the signs of approaching death.

Later, however, the narrator's nameless neighbour is dying

beside her and calls to her. The narrator asks:

Appelle-t-elle? Pourquoi appelle-t­elle? Elle a eu tout d'un coup la mort sur son visage, la mort violette aux ail es du nez, la mort au fond des orbites, la mort dans ses doigts que se tordent et se nouent comme des brindilles que mord la flamme, et elle dit dans une langue inconnue des paroles que je n'entends pas. (181) Is she calling? Why is she calling? All of a sudden she has death on her face, violet death on the sides of her nostrils, death at the depths of her eye sockets, death in her fingers that twist and crumple like twigs devoured by a flame, and she speaks in an unknown tongue words which I do not hear.

Here, language's primal communicative function is lost, the

intermediary between speaker and listener has been

irrevocably altered and the ungraspable language serves

rather to highlight the alienation of the individual in her

death. The face, nostrils, eye sockets and fingers are

inscribed with the testimony of their own destruction, an

inscription resisted by the unknown tongue which is

language. By presenting death in Auschwitz as irreducible

to language but as possessing, at the same time, its own

unknowable system of signification, the narrator implies

that the narration of death in the camps, while belonging

to its own hermetic (unnameable) logic, defies a poetics of

55

death. In this way, death in Auschwitz narrates the

process of dying as an impenetrable, unknowable and

solitary experience (Amery, 1986:17). Thus, the trope of

the crisis of naming, figured by the "unknown language" of

death manifests the narrator/survivor's concern not to

ascribe to death in Auschwitz a meaning. Jean-Frarn;ois

Lyotard' s statement that " 'Auschwitz' est 1 1 interdi t de la

belle mort [,]" (Lyotard, 1983: 149) ("Auschwitz is the

forbiddance of the beautiful death [,] ") (Lyotard, 1988: 100)

clearly echoes the narrator/survivor's concern to avoid a

rhetoric of death in Auschwitz. Such a rhetoric is to give

those who died a beautiful death, to ascribe a sense to

their death and therefore to death in Auschwitz. At the

same time, a rhetoric of death in the death camps and in

the concentration camps is impossible. Illustrating this

point, Jean Amery comments on the breakdown of death as

aesthetic construct in the camps:

For death in its literary, philosophic, or musical form there was no place in Auschwitz. No bridge led from death in Auschwitz to Death in Venice. Every poetic evocation of death became intolerable 1 whether it was Hesse / s "Dear Brother Death" or that of Rilke, who sang: "Oh Lord, give each his own death." The aesthetic view of death had revealed itself to the intellectual as part of an aesthetic mode of life; where the latter had been all but forgotten, the former was nothing but an elegant trifle. In the camp no Tristan music accompanied death, only the roaring of the SS and the Kapos. (1986:16-17)

In the face of the collapse of representational

resources with which to write about death/dying in

Auschwitz, Delbo's narrator brings attention rather to this

very collapse of representation. She describes how the

56

physical signs of death: "les langues gonflent noires, les

bouches pourrissent" (180) (the swollen black tongues, the

rotting mouths) resist the signification that language

claims to assign to them. Hence, "Toutes les paroles sont

depuis longtemps fletries I Tous les mots sont depuis

longtemps decolores" (180) (All words have for a longtime

become faded I All words have for a longtime become

discoloured.) Neither written nor spoken language (denoted

bye the French distinction between "paroles" and "mots") has

the same referential capacity to figuratively render death

after the Shoah. By juxtaposing the attempt to narrate the

signs of death with the ironic presentation of the

aesthetic impossibility of transmitting these signs in

poetic verse, the narrator makes visible the limits of her

own story.

DYSFUNCTIONAL THROATS: THE STORY OF AN UNTOLD STORY

Placed, so to speak, at the threshold of language,

place of conflict, tension and contradiction imposed by the

ethical imperative, writing after Auschwitz therefore

testifies to its own impossible articulation. Referring to

Robert Antelme's testament to the Lager, L'Espece Humaine,

Kofman characterises the writing of Auschwitz as well as

writing after Auschwitz as a contradictory impulse: A

frenetic desire to tell, which Kofman significantly

describes as un delire de paroles {Kofman, 1988: 44) ( a

delirium of words), and at the same time an inability to

speak. Such a writing is, precisely, the writing out of a

double-bind. Fraught with tension, the process of writing after Auschwitz is,

[ ... ] un etrange double-bind : une revendication infinie de parler, un devoir parler a l'infini, s'imposant avec une force irrepressible - et une impossibilite quasi physique de parler

57

: une suffocation·; une parole nouee, exigee et interdite, parce que trop longtemps rentree, arretee, restee dans la gorge et qui vous fait etouffer, perdre respiration, vous asphyxie, vous ote la possibilite meme de commencer. Devoir parler sans pouvoir parler [ .. . ) (Kofman, 1988:46) [a] double-bind which is the infinite revindication of speech, a command to speak which endlessly imposes itself with an irrepressible strength and ?n almost physical impossibility to speak: a suffocating, a choking, a demanding and forbidden language, which returns, stops and remains in the throat, suffocating, smothering, negating even the possibility of beginning. To have to speak and not being able to speak [ . .. ] . 14

The contradiction and difficulty inherent in the process of

bearing witness as well as the paradoxical role of language

in this process is characterised metaphorically by the

physical motion of choking, a motion significantly

generated at the physiological point of vocalisation. The

trope of the disfigured and fragmented body functions here

as a projection of a witnessing interrupted by inevitable

death. Kofman's description of choking, signified by the

wounded and dysfunctional throat resonates throughout

Delbo's text.

In a description of the emptying out of "block 25",

the dreaded transit block of the old, sick, mad, infirm and

selected prisoners on the way to the gas chambers, the

narrator remarks that the remaining live prisoners alighted

the truck and they " [ ... ] hurlaient parce qu 'ell es savaient

mais leS COrdeS VOCaleS S 1 etaient brisees danS leur gorge. II

(57) ( [ ... J screamed because they knew, but their vocal

cords had fractured in their throats.") In this way the

dysfunctional throat becomes the symbol of witnessing the

annihilation of the self and never bearing witness to that

14 My translation

58

death.

In another instance the same prisoner attempting to

drink water from the snow is attacked and killed by a

guard-dog on the order of an SS guard and we read:

Le chien bondi t sur la femme, lui pl ante ses crocs dans la gorge. Et nous ne bougeons pas, engl uees dans une espece de visqueux qui nous empeche d'ebaucher meme un geste comme dans un reve. La femme crie. Un cri arrache. Nous ne savons pas si le cri vient d'elle ou de nous, de sa gorge crevee ou de la n6tre. Je sens les crocs du chien a ma gorge. Je crie. Je hurle; Aucun don ne sort de moi. Le silence du reve. {48) The dog pounces on the woman, sinks its teeth into her throat. And we do not move, stuck in a viscous substance that prevents us from making the even a gesture - as in a dream. The woman screams. A sustained scream. We do not know if the cry comes from her or from us, from her punctured throat or from ours. I feel the teeth of the dog at my throat. I scream. I shriek. Not a sound comes out of me. The silence of dreams.

The conflation of narrator and prisoner as well as of dream

and reality highlights the narrative threshold crossed by

the survivor/witness from the living of her own death

enacted here through death of the mauled prisoner, to the

narration of the experience.

The following extract, which, again, is underpinned by

the image of the ravaged throat, is, significantly, a

description of the narrator's nightmare.

Les pieuvres nous etreignaient de leurs muscles visqueux et nous ne degagions un bras que pour etre etranglees par un tentacle qui s'enroulait autour du cou, serrait les vertebres, les serrait a les craquer, les vertebres, la trachee, l'oesophage, le larynx, le pharynx et tous ces conduits qu 'il y a dans le

59

COLI. les serrai t a les briser. Il fallait liberer la gorge et, pour se delivrer de l'etranglement, ceder les bras, les jambes, la taille [ ... ] (87) The octopi were strangling us with their viscous muscles and we freed an arm only to be choked by a tentacle that wrapped itself around our necks, squeezed the vertebrae, squeezed them until they snapped. The vertebrae, the trachea, the oesophagus, the larynx, the pharynx and all the passages of the throat, squeezed them till they broke. We had to free our throats in order to save ourselves from strangulation, we had to sacrifice our arms, our legs, our waists[ ... ].

i

Survival is contingent upon freeing the passages of the

throat, that is, upon telling the story. Here the

narrator's nightmare provides a detailed description of the

threat to each part of the anatomy which is used in

vocalisation/giving voice. Once again, the enumeration and

dislocation of body parts serve to stress that, after

Auschwitz, transmission proceeds through the articulation

of rupture and dislocation. However, the inverted

order/sense signified by the nightmare universe and the

context of description of the threatened witness, obviates

the possibility of articulation, and the mud threatens to

pore into the narrator's throat, nose, eyes and ears.

Witnessing Auschwitz is silenced as the sense organs, locus

of "deep memory's inscriptions on the body are drowned out.

The nightmare of suffocation of assault to the organs

of vocalisation is the narration of a threat to the telling

of the story, to surviving in order to speak, of an

unsuccessful witnessing.

BURNING THIRST AND THE NEED TO BEAR WITNESS

Two

narrate,

of the many vignettes

under the title, LA

comprising this volume

SOIF (The thirst) , the

60

prisoner's experience of a tormenting and unrelenting

thirst. Before examining the way in which the thirst

functions as a metaphor for one of the constitutive

elements of the double-bind situation, the survivor's

internalised injunction to survive - improbable in itself -

in order to bear witness to the Shoah, I would like to

examine how the trope of thirst is introduced in Delbo's

text. In Shoshana Felman's.discussion of Paul Celan's poem

Todesfuge the metaphor of the action of drinking is linked,

through an association of images, to the act of writing

(Felman & Laub, 1992:30). Significantly, Felman points out

that,

[ ... ] the act of drinking, traditionally a poetic metaphor for yearning, for romantic thirst and for desire, is here transformed into the surprisingly abusive figure of an endless torture and a limitless exposure [ ... 1 ( 1992: 30)

It is precisely this transformation which Felman comments

on that Delbo's narrator presents as the possibility of an

unfulfilled witnessing (the death of the narrator) .

Drinking, trope of physical and metaphysical yearning, of

life-infusing desire - signifying here the possibility of

bearing witness as the certainty of survival - is subverted

by the narration of unending thirst, of the perpetual

denial of drinking. Thus, the narrator precedes the

narration of thirst in Auschwitz precisely with a

presentation of the traditional narrative genres which will

be subverted by the trope of thirst in the camp. She

writes:

La soif c'est le recit des explorateurs, vous savez, dans les livres de notre enfance. C'est dans le desert. Ceux qui voient des mirages et marches vers l'insaisissable oasis. Ils ont soif trois jours. Le chapitre

61

pathetique du livre. A la fin du chapitre, la caravane du ravitaillement arrive, elle s'etait egaree sur les pistes brouillees par la tempete. Les explorateurs crevent les outres, ils boivent. Ils boivent et ils n'ont plus soif. (114) Thirst is the narrative of the explorers, you know, in the books of our childhood. It is in the desert. Those who see the mirages and walk towards the unreachable oasis. For three days they are thirsty. The pathetic chapter of the book. At the end of the chapter, the caravan arrives with fresh provisions, it had lost its way on the slopes, clouded by the storm. The explorers burst the goatskins, they drink. They drink and they are no longer thirsty.

Thirst in the Lager, however, has no respite. It is "le

soif du marais" (114) (the thirst of the marsh) which is

more burning than the thirst of the desert, in the face of

which, "[l]a raison chancelle. La raison est terrassee par

la soif. La raison resiste a tout, elle cede a la

soif."(p.

thirst.

thirst.)

114) (Reason waivers. Reason is flattened by

Reason can resist everything, it yields to

Clearly then, it is not only a literary tradition

of heroic narratives ("le recit des explorateurs" and "les

livres de notre enfance 11) of triumph and victory,

represented by the climactic imbibing of the libidinal,

life-giving liquid counterpointed by the narration of

struggle ("Le chapi tre pathetique") against physical

hardship, psychological torment and cosmic elements which

is being challenged. What is contested here is the very

epistemological foundation which underpins the

literary/historical tradition of these narratives: reason.

If the narration of the Holocaust disrupts reason, it

follows then that not only is thirst in Auschwitz a

narrative trope with which to figure the corollary of

Felman' s drinking/writing proposition, that is, to

represent the impossibility of surviving in order to write,

but a defiance of the grounds through which a writing of

62

survival produces traditional conceptions of truth. By

presenting the writing of improbable survival, signified by

the unquenchable thirst, as a breach with Reason, the

narrator of Aucun de nous ne Reviendra, pre-empts survival

itself as "unreasonable" and the reception of the

survivor's narration as "unbelievable". The challenge of

narrating and of representing the endurance and survival of

massive trauma is that the utterance threatens to drift

into a discourse which is outside of the language/reason

construct, that is, into madness:

Et le regard part a la derive, c'est le regard de la folie. Les autres di sent: << Elle est folle, elle est devenue fol le pendant la nui t », et elles font appel aux mots qui doivent reveiller la raison. (115) And the gaze drifts off, it is the gaze of madness. The others say, "She is mad, she went mad in the night", and they .appeal to words which are supposed to awaken reason.

Self-doubting memory is narrated as the I/eye-witness's

testimony of madness. The representation of disbelieved

testimony - uttered and read as a madness - as the listless

gaze of madness ("le regard part a la derive") inverts the

authority of the eye-witness by placing her testimony

outside of reason. In this way, the narrator's utterance

of selfhood - as I-witness - constituted by the gaze of

crazed thirst, once again presents the traces of memory as

a banished testimony.

As an impulse to testify we could read the yearning to

drink as a metaphorical life-giving need to bear witness:

just as water is the fundamental physical requirement for

life, so the need to transmit, to articulate testimony is

a fundamental psychical requirement for life after

survival. Anticipating this libidinally-charged duty of

testimony, the narrator presents the imploring pleas of

the women in Auschwitz block 25, destined for the gas

chambers, as cries to drink water. "On les voyai t aux

63

grillages des fenetres," (They could be seen through the

wire mesh of the windows) she writes, "Elles suppliaient :

<< A boire, A boire. >> Il y a des specres qui parlent. 11

(32) (They begged, "To drink, to drink." It is ghosts who

speak) . By shifting from the past imperfect tense

( "voyait" and "suppliaient") of narrative time to the

present tense ( 11parlent 11) 1 the historical moment of

telling, the narrator conflates the representation of the

past, the living women (then) and the present, the dead

women (now). In this way, the trope of unfulfilled thirst

comes to signify the never-to-be heard testimony as the

expression of a yearning to survive in order to bear

witness. The presence of the dead as ghosts which "speak"

in the text becomes the story, rather, of the narrator's

survival. However, as the telling of unquenchable thirst,

the account simultaneously contests that survival and the

success of its narration. Moreover, by presenting thirst

as memory banished to the discourse of madness, the

narrator anticipates her survival as an unacknowledged

return and a disbelieved testimony. Thus, the narrator's

mouth 11 [ ••• ] n 'est pas meme humectee et toujours les

paroles se refusent" (115) . { [ ... ] is not even moist and

still the words refuse to come.)

The trope of burning thirst metaphorically figures the

desire and inability to testify coherently, "reasonably" as

dislocated body parts. In this way the narrator once again

frames silence as disjointed body parts. Thus, incoherence

is produced through physiological breakdown, through the

silencing of the body parts which articulate, which produce

sound:

Le matin au reveil, les levres parlent et aucun son ne sort des levres. L'angoisse s'empare de tout votre etre [ ... ]. Est-ce cela, d'etre mort? Les levres essaient de parler, la bouche est paralysee. La bouche ne forme pas de paroles quand elle est seche, qu'elle n'a plus de salive. [ ... ] Les muscles de la bouche veulent tenter les mouvements de l 'articulation et

;

64

n'articulent pas. (115) On awakening in the mornings, lips speak and no sound emerges from the lips. Anguish seizes your whole being [ ... ] . Is it this, to be dead? The lips try to speak, the mouth is paralysed. The mouth does not form words when it is dry, when it has no more saliva. [ ... ] The mouth muscles want to attempt the articulation movements and do not articulate.

Referential speech and the logical processes of reason

collapse, yet the narration of this collapse is the

simultaneous narration of the anxiety of the unacknowledged

return, symbolised by survival as another type of death.

("Est-ce cela, d'etre mort? 11) Clearly, such a narration is

the anticipation of a rejected testimony by a disbelieving

world, the anticipation of 11 le desespoir de l'impuissance

a leur dire l'angoisse ·qui m'a etreinte, l'impression

d'etre morte et de le savoir. 11 (115) (the despair which

comes from the powerlessness of not being able to tell them

about the anguish which has gripped me, the impression of

being dead and of knowing it.)

REPRESENTING POWERLESSNESS: PARALYSED BODIES, SILENT

TESTIMONY

A recurring recollection which is central to countless

survivor accounts of the concentration camps is of the

devastating experience of the biting East European winter.

In Delbo' s text, the narration of the cold becomes a

representational device permitting the narration of the

disruption enacted by deep memory's silence. At the same

time, however, the glacial landscape and frozen bodies

become a metaphor for the powerlessness, the voicelessness

of the prisoner, who, enclosed in what survivor, David

Rousset has described as the "univers concentrationnaire"

(1946) (concentrationary universe}, is subject to the will

65

of the Nazi system.

Immobility and paralysis-induced silence is symbolised

by the frozen, numbed body and mirrored by the vastness of

the frozen expanse which is the glacial landscape within

and outside of the camp. "La lumiere est toujours

immobile, blessante, froide. C'est la lumiere d'un astre

mort. Et l'immensite glacee, a l'infini eblouissante, est

d'une planete morte. 11 (55) {The light is always immobile,

cutting, cold. It is the light of a dead star. And the

frozen expanse, infinitely dazzling, is of a dead planet.)

The prisoners are paralysed by the ice in which they are

caught, they are statues of frost, "inertes, insensibles,

nous avons perdu tous les sens de la vie" {55) (inert,

unfeeling, we have lost all the senses of life"). Standing

for hours at roll call, the narrator notes that,

[q] uinze mille femmes tapent du pied et cela ne fait aucun bruit. Le silence est solidifie en froid. La lumiere est immobile. Nous sommes dans un milieu ou le temps est aboli. Nous ne savons pas si nous sommes, seulement la glace, la lumiere, la neige aveuglante, et nous, dans cette glace, dans cette lumiere, dans ce silence. (53) [f] if teen thousand women stamp their feet and it makes no noise. The silence is solidified into cold. The light is immobile. We are in a place where time is abolished. We do not know if we exist, only the ice, the light, the blinding snow, and us, in this ice, in this light, in this silence.

Immured thus in the silence, the ice and the light, the

prisoners are inscribed into another life, or as the

narrator describes, " soumises a la respiration d'une autre

vie, a la mort vivante [ ... ]."(55) (subjugated by the

breath of another life, a life of the living death) . This

living death signifies the negation of the presence of

language through the presentation of the pure opposites of

66

the signs through which language yields meaning. These are

the silence, the ice and the light.

After describing a scene in Auschwitz where the living

inmates of "block 25" have to load the corpses of the block

into a crematorium bound truck before getting onto the

truck, having been selected for extermination themselves,

the narrator metonymically represents the women as frozen

statues of unmaterialised screams. We read that,

[el lles [les femmes] crient. Elles crient et nous n'entendons rien. Cet air froid et sec devrai t etre conducteur si nous etions dans le milieu terrestre ordinaire. Elles crient vers nous sans qu 'aucun son nous parvienne. Leurs bouches crient, leurs bras tendus vers nous crient, et tout d'elles. Chaque corps est un cri. Autant de torches qui £lambent en eris de terreur, de eris qui ont pris corps de femmes. Chacune est un cri materialise, -un hurlement - qu'on n'entend pas. (55-56) [t]hey [the women] cry. They cry and

we hear nothing. This cold and dry air would be a conductor if we were in an ordinary terrestrial environment. They cry in our direction yet no sound reaches us. Their mouths cry, their arms stretched out towards us cry, and all of them. Each body is a cry. So many torches burning with cries of terror, cries which have taken the form of women. Each one is a materialised cry, a scream that cannot be heard.

Once again, the narrator seeks to place in doubt the very

strategies she proposes for the narration of the Auschwitz

experience. Thus, this extract raises the important

question regarding the transmissibility of the story of the

annihilated presence of the "true witnesses" .

Representation of the body as locus of a collective,

cryptic cry highlights the limitations of its converse

signification: the body's absence becoming the negative

67

presence of silence-as-trace within this testimony to mass

murder . 15 By placing the aims of this memorial/textual

project in doubt, the narrator places the very possibility

of the textual transmission of silence ( "un conducteur"}

into question. As such, the addressee is once again

reminded that the true witness cannot speak and as such

remains, in the face of posterity, the absolutely

disempowered, the truly effaced.

In an article significantly entitled, Un cri ne

s' imprime pas (1993} (A Cry cannot be Printed), Anna

Langfus, survivor and writer, has written that the literary

transposition of memory is problematic not least because it

is a writing over, a palimpsest on the memory of the true

witness. Delbo' s narrator demonstrates clearly in the very

terms of her narration that this dilemma remains insoluble

and testifies, rather, to the dilemma itself.

The unheard, collectively embodied scream also

functions as an image of individual alienation in the

Lager:

Chaque visage est ecrit avec un telle precision dans la lumiere de glace, sur le bleu du ciel, qu'il s'y marque pour l'eternite. Pour l'eternite, des tetes rasees, pressees les unes contre les autres, qui eclatent de eris, des bouches tordues de eris qu'on n'entend pas, des mains agi tees dans un cri muet. Les hurlements restent ecrits sur le bleu du ciel. (57} Each face is inscribed with stark precision in the frozen light, on the blue of the sky, that it is marked

15 The negative presence of silence-as-trace evokes Jacques Derrida's proposition that, " [s] i un lieu meme s 'encercle de feu (tombe en cendre finalement, tombe en tante que nom), il n'est plus. Reste la cendre. If a place is itself surrounded by fire (falls finally to ash, into a cinder tomb), it no longer is. Cinder remains [ ... ]." (1991: 39} Derrida's statement, gestures, in turn, to Claude Lanzmann's description of the Holocaust as surrounded by a ring of fire and his subsequent suggestion that representation can only proceed through the presentation of the silence-as-trace. (Deguy, 1990)

68

there for eternity. For eternity, shaven heads squashed together, which burst into cries, mouths twisted by cries that are not heard, hands waving in a mute cry. The screams remain inscribed on the blue of the sky.

In this crepuscular universe which witnesses the implosion

of temporal consciousness, the death-like state of

paralysis and temporal suspension evoked by the frozen body

serve paradoxically to heighten the alienation of the

individual, of each face rendered silent in the midst of

collective muteness. By alienation of the individual, I do

not mean of the psychically or physically whole individual.

Throughout the narrative the body is neveL represented as

an integrated whole, only as disparate parts and organs.

Clearly, then, the image of body fragmentation is a

metaphor for the fragmented, dehumanized and dislocated

self, that is, the self both in and after Auschwitz.

VIOLENCE TO LANGUAGE/VIOLENT LANGUAGE: ARTICULATING POWER

Thematically counterpointed to the mute immobility and

frozen silence of the prisoner are the senseless,

amorphous but actualised screams of the oppressor.

For Delbo, words have lost their meaning in Auschwitz

and language in l'univers concentrationnaire becomes its

own inverse: it becomes the expression of madness, of non­

sense, of non-reason and of confusion. In part a response

which resists the allocation of meaning to Auschwitz, the

presentation of language as violent noise and non-sense

underlines the violence done to language whose capacity to

express the new realities of the Lager is coercively

wrought through the neologising of a Lagerjargon: a

polyglot and multi-lingual jargon. (Levi, 1988: 74 -79;

Friedlander, 1980:103-111)

The text characterises the representatives of the

69

Lager as brutal noise. This is underlined in a comment on

the brutality and unpredictability of the SS guards, kapos

and Anweiserins. They supervise the work details labouring

in the marshes, and are referred to as "screams", that is,

they possess the power of the voice, which, outside of

language, becomes a vocalisation of immanent violence.

Unlike the unmaterialised, silent screams as which she

continuously characterises the prisoners, the screams of

the others, to whom she also refers as "the furies", are

endless and overwhelming in volume. They are

Les hurlements. Les hurlements. Les hurlements qui hurlent jusqu 'aux confins invisibles du marais. [ ... ] [CJ riant, criant toujours les memes mots, les memes injures repetees dans cette langue incomprehensible [ ... ] . (77) Screams. Screams. Screams that scream to the invisible limits of the marsh. [ ... ]yelling, always yelling the same words, the same insults repeated in the same incomprehensible language [ ... ] . ( 53)

The violence of the SS, the Anweiserins, the kapos, is

represented through a language which becomes, in itself,

an agent of violence. In a description of night in the

Lager, the narrator describes how

[ ... ] les cauchemars se levent, prennen t f orme dans l 'ombre, de to us les etagements montent les plaintes et les gemissements des corps meurtris qui luttent contre la boue, contre les faces d'hyenes hurlantes : Weiter, weiter, car ces hyenes hurlent ces mots-la et il n'y a plus que la ressource de se blottir sur soi-meme [ .•• ] • (90) [ ... J the nightmares come up, take farm in the shadows, from all the bunks the moans and groans rise from the bruised bodies which fight against the mud, against the faces of screaming hyenas: Weiter, weiter, for these hyenas scream those words and the only resource that remains is to retreat into oneself.

70

Clearly, Kofman' s 11 delire de paroles" (Kofman, 1988 :45)

(delirium of words), the frenetic desire to bear witness,

as a survivor, is not the linguistic excess described in

the nightly dream deliria. The brutal vocality - evoked

through the repetition of 11 weiter" - of the SS, the kapos

and the Anweiserins compounds the prisoner's powerlessness.

I have previously examined the way in which the trope

of immobility functions as a metaphor of an imploding or

auto-consuming silence of the prisoner. In this extract,

silence, a response to "hyenes hurlent ces mots-la" (hyenas

scream those words), is produced through a recoiling

inwards ("se blottir sur soi-meme", retreat into oneself).

NUMERATION: TRANSACTING POWER

As we have seen, the narration of time in Auschwitz

manifests a circularity, a simultaneously compressed and

expanded temporality which reflects the experience of the

camp as a suspended timelessness predicated on the hermetic

logic of the concentrationary space, where 11 [l] e silence

est solidifie en froid. La lumiere est immobile. Nous

sommes dans un milieu oil le temps est aboli." (53) (the

silence is solidified into cold. The light is immobile. We

are in a space where time is abolished.) Delbo' s text

confronts the narration of space, its surfaces, its

contents and its objects in renegotiated terms of

representation. I would suggest that one of the ways that

the narration of space operates is not as a semiotics of

the topography of the milieu of the concentration camp but

as the narration of the material commodification of the

human presence in the Lager whereby the individual is

transformed into an anonymous, faceless collective whose

value is measurable and quantifiable. Common memory as

communication, represented by referential language, is

disrupted in the camp, but the narration of the

relationship between people and one another and between

71

people and space sets up the simultaneous transformation

and transvaluation of prisoners from individuals to a

faceless collectivity based on the exchange of language as

communication for numeration as communication. Moreover,

this transformation is sustained by a system of logic: a

bureaucracy whose numerate language transacts its power

over the effaced agent of the prisoner's body. Social

historian, Michel Foucault's theorisation of the politics

of the body is useful in this regard16:

On y traiterait du <<Corps politique>> comme ensemble des elements materiels et des techniques que servent d'armes, de relais, de voies de communication de points d'appui aux relations de pouvoir et de savoir qui investissent les corps humains et les assujetissent en en faisant des objets de savoir. (1975:33)

One would be concerned with the 'body politic' , as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge. (1979:28)

In the Lager the body's agency is transformed by the very

numbers inscribed onto it. In Chapter One the significance

of presenting memory as an em-bodied recollection is

examined with reference to the negation of the body's

presence in the Lager. Levi's contention regarding the

body's effacement is that the "coercion of nudity" is part

of an intentional and systematic dehumanisation process,

stripping the individual and her/his body of all signs of

humanness, reinforcing, thus, the biological superiority of

the oppressor. (Levi, 1989:90) For Levi, the prisoner's

body becomes the locus on which power is practised. Here,

however, the text continues on this trajectory by exploring

the dehumanisation process as part of a system which

16 See also Feldman, 1991 and Deleuze & Guattari, 1972

72

replaces the terms which signify negative (or non-) human

presence with the positive referents of capital: not only

is the prisoner invalidated as human being in life prior to

inevitable death, s/he is commodif ied, reinvented as

"stuff". This transformation occurs as a transaction on

the body the moment that the prisoner's arm is indelibly

tattooed with her/his new identity: the number. Thus,

"ft] ous etaient marques au bras d'un numero / indelebile /

Tous devaient mourir nus I Le tatouage identif iai t les

marts et les mortes. 11 (24) ([e]veryone was inscribed on the

arm with a number I indelible I Everyone had to die naked

I Tattooing identified the dead men and the dead women.)

numeration the tattooed When naming collapses,

inscription on the body -

which is, in turn, the

emerges as a means to identify

body's testimony to its own

subjugation. As such, numeration articulates a politics

of identification which is central to the power practices

governing and regulating the camp hierarchy. As a system

of identification, tattooed numbers become a parody of

naming, replacing conventional terms of identification. In

this way numbers, as the bureaucratic or institutional

language of power, become central to the way that meaning

is produced in the Lager.

Fundamental to the practice of power in the camp is

the ritualisation of the transformative enactment of this

language which is played out in the Lager in the infamous

roll-call, repeated twice daily. It is therefore the

roll- call that becomes, " [ ... ] in our dreams of

'afterwards'[ ... ] the very emblem of the Lager, summing up

in itself the fatigue, cold, hunger and frustration."

(Levi, 1988:92) Primo Levi describes the roll-call thus:

It certainly was not a nominal roll­call which with thousands or tens of thousands of prisoners would have been impossible: all the more so because they were never ref erred to by name but only by the five or six digits on the registration number. It was Zahlappell, a complicated and

73

laborious counting-call which had to take into consideration prisoners transferred to other camps or to the infirmary the evening before and those who had died during the night because the present number must square exactly with the figures of the preceding day. (Levi, 1988:91}

According to the logic of numeration as communication the

euphemistic language produced through the will to power of

the Nazi vision, the dead are identified and identifiable

all the more so that they are dead. In the inverted logic

of the Lager represented by this language system of

numbers, the dead count. Thus, human presence is negated

through the articulation of an accounting in the language

of the bureaucrat.

into commodity in

Demonstrating the

Moreover, the presence is transformed

the process of naming by numbering.

dynamics of this transformation, we

examine Delbo's narrator's description of roll-call:

Alors les colonnes se forment en carres. Dix par dix, sur dix rangs. Un carre apres l 'autre. Un damier gris sur · 1a neige etincelante. La derniere colonne. Le dernier carre s 'immobilise. Des eris pour que la bordure du damier soit bien nette sur la neige. Les SS gardent les coins. Que veulent-ils faire? Un officier a cheval passe. Il regarde les carres parfaits que dessinent quinze mille femmes sur la neige. Il tourne bride, satisfai t. Les eris cessent. Les sentinelles commencent a faire les cent pas autour des carres. (52} Then the columns form themselves into squares. Ten by ten, in rows of ten. One square after the next. A grey draughtboard on the sparkling snow. The last column. The last square comes to a stop. Shouts so that the border of the draughtboard should be sharp against the snow. The SS look after the corners. What do they want to do? An officer on horse-back passes. He observes the perfect squares which fifteen thousand women form on the snow. He turns his horse,

satisfied. guards begin squares.

The to

74

shouts patrol

end. around

The the

Dehumanisation, transaction of power in which the body's

agency is revealed in this extract, is narrated as the

parody of the very language which negates that presence.

The narration presents the prisoner's body as an extended

subjectivity of the Nazi oppressor. In this way the

prisoner's body becomes directly implicated in the

cosmology of the Nazi vision. As such, the prisoner's body

is transformed into an agent of that organisational vision,

and then, into the signified structuration of that vision:

the bodies become geometrical squares.

Clearly, every criterion which can measure, account,

quantify and therefore impact, according to the logic of

numeration, on the outcome of the situation can be plotted

along the quantifying axes of a mathematical graph. In

another vignette, entitled 11 L'appel" (the roll-call), the

narrator knows that a counting error, signified by a

prolonged roll-call, means imminent danger. Clearly then

counting and accounting produces meanings which language

cannot not. Thus, "[q]uand il se prolonge," she writes, "

c'est qu'il ya quelque chose. Erreur de compte ou danger.

Quelle sorte de danger? On ne le sait jamais. Un danger. 11

(86) The SS passes in front of the rows of women and stops

in front of a row of Greek women. Here he asks which women

are between the ages of twenty and thirty who have bore a

live infant. From the signifying system of the procedures

of the roll-call, the narrator can infer that "[Ill faut

renouveler les cobayes du block d'experiences. Les

Grecques viennent d'arriver. Nous, nous sommes la depuis

trop longtemps. Quelque semaines. Trop maigres ou trop

affaiblies pour qu'on nous ouvre le ventre." (86) (It is

necessary to renew the guinea-pigs in the experimentation

block. The Greeks have just arrived. We, we have been

here for too long. A few weeks. Too thin or too weak to

75

have our stomachs opened.) The presence of the prisoners

at roll-call are the collective agency enacting the

transformation of the way that the body signifies. In the

space/place of the roll-call, the Greek women are

transformed by these statistical signif iers into laboratory

guinea-pigs.

Reduced to noise and mutually incomprehensible babble,

language collapses in the camps. It is numeration - now

transformed into a system of commodifying transactions -

which permits communication. Following the trajectory of

this logic, the only time in the text where dialogue is

explicitly presented as verbal interchange (the word,

"dialogue", appears as title to the vignette) communication

is replaced by the promise of material transaction. As a

new signifying system, this commodifying language of

numbering in the Lager permits "communication" or verbal

exchange. Thus, under the title "DIALOGUE", the narrator

writes

<< Oh! Sally, tu as pense a ce que je t 'ai demande? » Sally court sur la Lagers trasse. A sa mi se, on voi t qu'elle travaille aux Effekts. C'est le commando qui trie, inventorie, range tout ce que contiennent les bagages des juifs, les bagages que les arrivants laissent sur le quai. Celles qui travaillent aux Effekts ont de tout. <<Oui, ma cherie, j'y ai pense, mais il n'y en a pas en ce moment. Il n'est pas arrive de convoi depuis huit jours. On en attend un cette nui t. De Hongrie. Il etait temps, .nous n'avions plus rien. Au revoir. A demain. J'aurai ton savon.» On vient d'installer l'eau dans le camp. (154) "Oh! Sally, have you thought about what I have asked you? 11 Sally was running along Lagerstrasse. From her appearance, one can see that she works in Effekts. That is the commando that sorts, stocklists and arranges all the contents of the luggage of the Jews, the luggage which the arrivals leave on the platform. Those who work in

76

Effekts have everything. "Yes, dear, I thought about it, but their isn't any at the moment. There's been no convoys .for eight days. We are expecting one tonight. From Hungary. It's about time, we haven't anything left any more. Bye. Till tomorrow. I'll have your soap." Water has just been installed in the camp.

The terms which enable the dialogue to proceed, are the

promise of exchange of commodities, the logic of material

gain taken to the limit. In this way, numeration, the

Lager's technology of communication elides the identity,

source and origin of the luggage of the "convoys" and

implicates these convoys in their future prof it as

commodity. Language, as "communication", only succeeds

when the logic of numerati ve language, symbol of the

industrialisation and commodif ication of death, underpins

its agency.

Aucun de nous ne Reviendra comes to be shown as a

significant text precisely because it sets out a programme

for giving testimony within the literary text by

articulating survival and the conditions which precede it

as a crisis of both language and of identity. Through the

structural and thematic representation of fragmentation, it

is precisely the making "present the existence of the

unpresentable" (Hartman, 1992:321) that Charlotte Delbo's

narrative achieves.

77

CHAPTER III

UNE CONNAISSANCE INUTILE

<< Il n'est d'ex:plosion qu'un 11.vre. >> un livre : un livre parmi d'autres, ou un livre renvoyant au Liber unique, dernier et essentiel, ou plus justement le Livre majuscule qui est toujours n' importe quel livre, deja sans importance ou au­deliil. de l'important. << Explosion >>, un livre; ce qui veut dire que le livre n'est pas le rassemblement laborieux d'une totalite enfin obtenue, mais a pour etre l 'eclatement bruyant, silencieux, qui sans lui ne Se produirait (ne s'affirmerait pas), tandis qu'appartenant lui-meme a l'etre eclate, violemment deborde, mis hors etre, il $' indique comme Sa propre violence d' exclusion, le refus fulgurant du plausible: le dehors en son devenir d'eclat. [ •.. ] Peut-etre faudrait-il citer, avertissement toujours inedit, le mots vivifiants d'un poete tres proche : << Bcoutez, pretez l'oreille : .m8me tres a l'ecart, des 11.vres aimis, des 11.vres essentiels ont commence de rliler. >> (Rene Char.) (Maurice Blancbot L'Ecriture du Desastre, p.190)

TBE BOOK BECOMES WITNESS

The second volume of the Auschwitz et Apres trilogy,

presents the survivor/narrator's experience of living

through and surviving Auschwitz and then Ravensbruck as an

exploration of narration of the Holocaust as an

intertextual dialogue. In this way, the text approaches

questions of historicisation and canonisation through the

optic of ~ntertextuality, where the text becomes the corpus

on which memory is inscribed. Moreover citation is also

examined as a strategy of resistance in Auschwitz which

explores the role of memory in relation to literature both

in Auschwitz and in the wake of the Holocaust.

Beginning this volume with a quote by poet and writer,

Paul Claudel, followed by numerous instances of references

to and rewriting and citation of other French writers,

playwrights and poets, the narrative is, therefore,

constituted as a dialogue with other literary texts.

I would say that by gesturing to other literary texts,

this narrative, raises the question as to its own status as

Auschwitz narrative within the canon of French literature

and, by extension the canonic impulse of the testimonial

text as well as to its own citeability as a circulating

text. Ultimately, the historicisation of the testimonial

text occurs through the canonisation of the text and/or

through intertextual dialogue, that is, through its

inclusion in the structures and modes, critiqued and

78

contested, of transmitted knowledge. 17 Historian, Dominick

LaCapra reminds us however, in a psychoanalytically framed

proposition, that the canonic impulse in Holocaust

narratives should be examined in relat.ion to the

repressions or elisions produced as an avoidance or

marginalisation mechanism set up by such an impulse

(LaCapra, 1994:23). LaCapra notes that

In the case of traumatic events, canonization involves the mitigation or covering over of wounds and creating the impression that nothing really disruptive has occurred. Thus one forecloses that possibility of mourning, renders impossible a critical engagement with the past, and impedes the recognition of problems (including the return of the repressed). (1994:23)

Clearly, the urge to canonic status as a normalisation

strategy of narratives of Holocaust memory covers over

aspects of that memory which are both threatening and

painful as well as resistant to foreclosure. At the same

time, however, readings of Holocaust narratives in relation

to canons and counter-canons bring new understandings to

perennially cited texts. The self-reflectivity of Delbo's

narratives has the contrapuntal effect of defamiliarising

the works which are cited and engaged with. In this way

her texts highlight the disruption which the canonic

inclusion of Holocaust narrative entails. It can be

assumed then, that by raising the issue of canonicity and

by evoking the texts of the "great poets" of the French

literary pantheon, Delbo's text presents an argument both

for incorporation in the canons (or in the discussions that

surround them) as well as for the destabilisation of these

17 The debates around the politics of canonicity and canonisation are outside of the scope of this study and therefore will not be explored. In this regard see LaCapra, 1994.

79

canons. Thus, in the same way that the description of

thirst experienced in Auschwitz in Aucun de nous ne Reviendra proceeds through the initial subversion of

traditional genres which narrate stories of thirst and

survival, so too the gesture to canonic inclusion brings

into question the very authority and epistemological

grounds on which canons are constituted.

Perhaps Delbo' s text seeks to insert itself in a

literary tradition precisely because Shoah literature as

literary 11 paragenre 11 is a removal of the Shoah from history

and an obliteration of the survivor's voice - a double

death of the victim.

Published by Les Editions de Minuit under the rubric

of their series, "Documents", a category which supports the

truth-claim of the writer as a witness to the historical

event, the format and categorisation of Auschwitz et Apres become mechanisms of another displacement. The publisher's

categorisation, then, can be seen as a decision not to

engage in the problematising and fracturing issues raised

by the choice of writing poetry, fictional and documentary

vignettes. The classification of the text as historical

document becomes an act which ref uses the text entry into

the category of "Literature 11 and thus, into the canons of

the literary text itself. In this way, the title of this

volume Une Connaissance Inutile (A Useless/Futile

Knowledge), points to its own exclusion from a canonicity

which it is trying to achieve. I would argue that it is

precisely by constructing an intertext of canonised

literary references and quotations, as a way of endorsing

the transmission of Holocaust memory, that the text tries

to achieve canonicity.

In an interview with a journalist from L'Express newspaper (1966), Delbo refers specifically to this text

when she states that, "On a acquis des connaissances, c'est vrai, mais des connaissances qui ne peuvent pas servir, parce que c'est une experience hors de la vie." (Different

knowledge was acquired, it is true, but such a knowledge

80

cannot serve, becaase it is an experience which is outside

of life.) As Lawrence Langer observes, the title of this

second volume, alluded to in Delbo's interview with

L'Express, is lifted off a phrase that Albert Camus entered

into his notebook, significantly in response to a novel

that he was reading: "Only death is true knowledge. But at

the same time it is what makes knowledge useless: it's

progress is sterile." (Langer, 1978:202). As such, Camus'

own contributions to the literary representation of the

trauma of war and of the alienation of survivors and

witnesses to atrocity is evoked. · After Auschwitz, this

representatation resonates with an historical accumulation

of very different meanings or contestations of meaning.

Moreover, by naming her text as a citation of a celebrated,

canonised author and public intellectual (with the

appropriate literary credentials) Delbo demonstrates how

citation could function as a paternalistic introduction (or

exclusion) of a problematic text into the canonised

corpus. 18 In this way the citeability of this text, that

is, its circulation as text, named after Camus' phrase, is

ensured.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE DOUBLE-BIND: CITATION

Delbo engages directly in the challenge to language in

representing Auschwitz as well as to Shoah narrative's

canonic exclusion by once again structuring the text

around a double-impasse, a double-bind, site of fracture

and displacement par excellence. On the first unnumbered

page of text, that is, as a paratextual warning we read:

18 One could speculate as to whether Francois Mauriac's preface to Elie Wiesel's La Nuit (1958) functioned as a paternalistic gesture of literary endorsement which pre-empted the canonic status, in turn, of Wiesel's text. Ironically, however, Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize and not the Literature Prize, an acknowledgement which invalidates his testimony as literary.

81

"Nous arrivions de trap loin pour meriter votre croyance"

Paul CLAUDEL. l.9 (We were arriving from too far away to

deserve your belief) Placed within the rupture which is

the double-bind, the structural dislocation of the text

comes to represent the post-Auschwitz testimonial impulse

to contradictory injunctions. As in the first volume,

Aucun de nous ne Reviendra, the double-bind highlights the

dangers of presuming meaning by situating the shifting

sands of signification within the fracture set up by the

interplay of verite and veridique. It is important to

note, with reference to intertextuality as a strategy to

both stabilise and destabilise meaning as a mode of

demonstrating the problematics of representation, that the

epigraph20 which introduced Aucun de nous ne Reviendra is

discovered by historian, Annette Wieviorka (1992), to be a

citation of poet Paul Eluard's Armes de la douleur:

Je dis ce que je vois, Ce que je sais Ce qui est vrai (186)

I say what I see What I know what is true21

Once again eye-witness truth-claims which underpin the

seamlessness of tradional or legalistic testimonial

narratives are problematised. Truth, veracity and

credibility are not given primacy over memory of Auschwitz

in representations of those memories but are contested by

a narrative that seeks to explore the epistemological

implications of narrating memory. The grounds of knowledge

19 All quotations from Une Connaissance Inutile, in this chapter, will be referenced by page number only.

20 Auj ourd 'hui, j e ne suis pas sure que ce que j 'ai ecri t soit vrai. Je suis sure que c'est veridique.

21 My translation of Eluard's poem

82

whose scrutiny is pointed towards in the titles of both the

trilogy and this volume itself are directly challenged by

this specular mise en abime of "croyance", (belief) in the

Claudel citation. The text emerges from the publishing

house bearing all the signs of a self-proclaiming

"historical document", a documentary narrative and eye­

witness testimony, yet the very first words constitute a

literary quotation, that is, they are ascribed to another,

their utterance preceding - historically and literarily­

the text that follows. The final page of written text is also unnumbered and

corresponds structurally to the initial Claudel citation.

This page, outside of the narrative proper, functions as a

paratextual "last word" which places the authority of the

text which precedes it into question:

Je reviens d'au-dela de la connaissance il faut maintenant desapprendre j e v o is bi en qu'autrement je ne pourrais plus vivre

Et puis mieux vaut ne pas y croire a ces histoires de revenants plus jamais vous ne dormirez si jamais vous le croyez ces spectres revenants qui reviennent sans pouvoir meme expliquer comment.

I am returning from beyond knowledge Now it is necessary to unlearn I see that well/clearly otherwise I would no longer be able to live

And besides It is better rather to not believe these stories of ghosts you will never sleep again if you ever believe these returning spectres wh,o return

83

without even being able to explain how.

Each stanza takes up one side of Claudel / s classically

symmetrical statement which introduces the text. Thus, "Je

reviens d 'au dela" takes up the introductory statement

"nous arrivions de trop loin" and rewrites it in the light

of the survivor's chance return. The survivor, after

Auschwitz, returns alone ( 11 Je 11, I), fragmented, dislocated,

as opposed to the returning community ("nous", we) of

Claudel which implies a shared/shareable experience. The

return is present and continuous ( "reviens 11 I returning)

for the traces of Auschwitz are inscribed on the returning

survivor as an event with no end, an event without limits,

an event which is "au dela" (beyond) / and therefore not

bound by the distant yet finite borders implied by the

descriptive "trop loin" (too far) . Beyond the

transcription and transmission of the memory, that is,

beyond the act of return uttered by the narrator within the

temporal immediacy contained by the present tense of the

narrative ("reviens 11 and 11 reviennent") the written word

itself continues to return in post-Auschwitz narrative

branded by its submission to the death-camp. The very

narration of memory enacts a return which, in turn, marks

the process of 11 desapprendre 11 (unlearning) . In the inverted

logic of the Shoah universe to "learn" the teachings of the

death-camp are to learn silence, paralysis, dissimulation·

and death. Thus, the process of bearing witness,

fragmentary, dislocated as it is, becomes the enterprise to 11 desapprendre 11 (unlearn), whereby the survivor facilitates,

by writing the fissure of the eternally returning self and

the dead, the reinsertion of'herself in language and in the

world of the living, ("qu'autrement I je ne pourrais plus

vivre") (otherwise I I would no longer be able to live)

The second part of Claudel's statement, ( 11 pour meriter

votre croyance", to merit your belief) is taken up in the

second stanza and casts the survivor's story as a narration

84

of "fantasy", as ghost stories ("histoires de revenants")

anticipating return from the Lager as the tale of the

incredible story told to a disbelieving world. As a

rewriting/reciting, of the Claudel quotation at the

beginning, the returning survivors words become the final

palimpsest inscribing the traces of their own impossible

transmission on the utterance of a signifying

representative of the received literary canon. The self­

reflexive doubt expressed in these lines therefore

destabilises both the fictionality and the historicality of

the preceding text.

APOLLINAIRE, POETRY, COMMON MEMORY: AN INTERTEX:TUAL

DIALOGUE

As a narrative which contests the possibility of

beautiful language after the Shoah, the text submits poetic

discourse to the traces of the Shoah through an

intertextual dialogue with representatives of the poetic

canons.

It is clear that as a consecrated document, that is,

a printed text which has been submitted to the writer,

editor and publisher's demands, the text's ordering of the

narrator's memory as dislocated linkages, connections and

relationships serves to highlight the epistemological

problematic presented by the Shoah from the optic of the

written text specifically. It would seem then, that the

sustained dialogue with literary texts points specifically

to the citeability of the earlier texts and, by extension,

to citation as a means to suggest, to gesture towards the

unknowable. Citation, thus creates an intertext which once

again places signification into question. Yet, it is

through citation that the text comes to be consecrated.

According to a book review of Delbo's recently

translated texts, Delbo wrote the three volumes of ·her

Aucun de Nous ne Reviendra immediately following her

85

liberation from Ravensbruck. (Houlding, 1995) The

manuscript was then put away and finally, published almost

twenty years later because, according to its author's

desire, "it had to withstand the test of time. It had to

travel far into the future." (Houlding, 1995:3) Now, the

historical moment in which the text is edified offers no

literary or written precedent for the framing of Holocaust

survivor memory. It is a moment marked by a public

discomfort and resistance to listening to or reading the

transcribed memories of the survivor. The autobiographical

memoirs which proliferate in the late forties, the fifties

and sixties have not yet been published. I would argue

then that it is precisely due to this lack of written or

published survivor narratives that Charlotte Delbo turns to

the literary paradigm in order to provide a narrative model

which could frame the matrix of memory and which could, in

turn, be subverted and critiqued. Citation and

inter·textual reference create a multilayered narrative

which turns on itself, on its own means of construction and

challenges the modes of representation which the literary

paradigm provides. Thus, the intertext becomes the

cognitive abyss, space of rupture, displacement and non­

closure par excellence. In this way Delbo creates an

"anti-aesthetic" - the representational resource of common

memory - of the Shoah in a similar way to poet Paul Celan's

poetics.

Writing herself, through her memory, into the

survivor's twilight world which is living and writing on a

threshold, the narrator inscribes the survivor's voice onto

the literary tradition. To speak of a literary tradition

after Auschwitz is legitimised, thus, when spoken in

relation to Auschwitz. And so the narrator/Delbo writes:

Moi aussi j'avais reve de desespoirs et d'alcools autrefois avant Je suis remontee du desespoir

86

La memoire m'est revenue et avec elle une souf france qui m'a fait m'en retourner a la patrie de l'inconnu

I too had dreamed of sorrows and of alcohols then before I have come back from despair My memory has returned and with it a suffering which has made me go back to the homeland of the unknown

The allusion to Apollinaire's collection of poems,

"Alcools" establishes a dialogue with the poetic texts

within the collection, strands of which run through this

entire volume. However, it is the anteriorisation of this

relationship marked by 11 autrefois 11 and "avant" which

resonates and impacts upon its utterance in the present.

"I too" aligns the narrator/Delbo with the pre-Auschwitz

infatuation with Maurice Blanchot's "idyllic" or beautiful

language. The use of the past perfect tense delineates

the trajectory of poetic language tropes through rupture

from a poetics of despair "then", "before" the Shoah to a

self-referential witnessing of its own demise. Thus, the

demise of beautiful language rests in its inability to name

the returning survivor's suffering or to frame her

returning memories and whose metaphorical "patrie"

(home/homeland) is unknown and eternally unknowable.

As a gesture of subversive and subverting irony,

intertextual reference, constructed at the beginning of the

text as the first pivot of the double-bind, is constructed

here as a eulogy to a compatriot who dies in Auschwitz.

What it becomes, however, is a eulogy to the narrator's

venerated poets and, by extension, to the tropes of

figurative language which constitute both the reference and

the eulogy:

87

A YVONNE BLECH Nous etions ivres d'Apollinaire et de Claudel vous souvient-il?

C'est le debut d'un poeme dont je voulais me souvenir pour vous le dire

J'ai oublie taus les mots ma memoire s'est egaree dans les delabres des jours passes

ma memoire s'en est allee

et nos ivresses anciennes Apollinaire et Claudel meurent ici avec nous

FOR YVONNE BLECH We were intoxicated by Apollinaire and by Claudel Do you remember him? It's the beginning of a poem which I wanted to recall so that I could tell it to you I have forgotten all the words My memo~y has gone astray in the midst the ruins of past days my memory has gone away and our former passions Apollinaire and Claudel die here with us

We know that Yvonne Blech was transported along with Delbo

to Auschwitz (Delbo, 1965:43) so the memorial function of

this dedication gestures towards its own non-fictionality,

to its historicity. As a historical referent it also

blurs the distinctions between narrative categories,

between fiction and reality. As a commemoration of one who

died in Auschwitz which is articulated in an intertextual

zone of citation, this poem disrupts through its operation

of blurring and conflating narrative genres.

This poem, dedicated to Yvonne Blech, evokes

Apollinaire's cycle of poems entitled "Poemes a Yvonne"

(541) (Poems for Yvonne) in his collection, "Le Guetteur

88

Melancolique" (537) (The Melancholic Look-out) . 22 In

publisher, Gallimard's Pleiade edition, the title of this

collection, "Le Guetteur Melancolique" precedes the

following lines on a separate page which, in turn, precede

the first poem of the cycle dedicated to the "Yvonne" of

Apollinaire:

Et toi mon coeur pourquoi bats-tu

Comme un guetteur melancolique J 1 observe la nuit et la mart (539)

And you my heart why do you beat

Like a melancholic watch I observe night and death23

By evoking this collection, the narrative highlights the

incredible, yet accidental irony created by poetic

language, that is, an irony despite itself. Ironic because

the intertextual reference gestures to a poetic statement

which after Auschwitz becomes a eulogy its own demise as

"pure" poetry. However, by engaging Apollinaire's text in

dialogue, Delbo's text raises the narrative dilemma of who

the text is addressed to if survivors' language points

insistently to its own "patrie de 1 1 inconnu", to its own

unnameable landscape which implicates its addressee/s in

that problematic of naming.

The question of addressee to the poetic text-as­

memory is raised by Shoshana Felman in her citation of Paul

Celan's Meridian Speech where he compares the poetic

project to sending "a message in a bottle" (Felman &

Laub,1992:37). Delbo's text's self-conscious address is to

her dead friend, II a Yvonne Blech" I who is directly

addressed as a "vous", a you-object of speech. In the same

22 All references to Apollinaire's poetry are from his Oeuvres Poetiques (1956)

23 My translation

89

way as Apollinaire's prescient utterance operates, it is

through an accidental irony brought about by the

narrator/Delbo's survival that the dead friend comes to be

addressed, to be named, and so, to be inscribed onto this

unnameable/unnaming landscape. Apollinaire's utterance, as

utterance of the Auschwitz survivor, in turn, accumulates

an irony which highlights the absolute arbitrariness of

survival. The survivor could indeed ponder the chance

which causes the heart to continue beating as it waits for

its own inevitable night.

Apollinaire's collection "Guetteur Melancolique" is

dedicated to a love-object, his "voisine divine" {543), his

beloved neighbour. In her name, Poemes a Yvonne, {542) he

dedicates his cycle, and as "Lettre-Poemes" { 545-546)

(Letter-Poems), he constructs his verse. His collection

of "poemes inedits" {unedited poems) contains a poem

entitled "Carte Postale a Yvonne" (852) {Postcards to

Yvonne) and the collection of 11 Poemes a la Marraine" (Poems

for the godmother) contains a poem entitled "Pour

Y.B". {549) Thus, the narrator's "A Yvonne Blech" addresses

.both a historical addressee as well as a corpus of poetry

which, in turn, are the objects of an addressing utterance

whose tropes of production are known and knowable.

Through its dialogue with poems which are expressions

of unrequited emotion, the narrator's poem articulates its

engagement with the personal, the relational and the

emotional, important subtexts of this volume. In this way,

diverse definitions and functions of poetic language and

its fictional and historical addressees, are raised and

engaged in within this intertextual space.

It is precisely through citation that the death of

"beautiful language" is marked. By referring outside of

the impenetrable and hermetic universe of the Shoah, the

breakage, the rupture is signified. "Apollinaire et

Claudel I meurent ici avec nous" {Apollinaire and Claude!

I die here with us) brings all poetry and all literature

to Auschwitz.

90

Apollinaire and Claudel represent here the corpus of

classic literary creation (precisely because of their

difference, their incomparability as poets, writers and

intellectuals) . It would seem then that the palimpsest of

poetry is the gesture of the post-Auschwitz document to

insert itself within this corpus of literary work, the

canonic impulse which becomes the ultimate reinsertion of

the self and the text into a language which, precisely

because it is marked by the fragmentation of the trauma of

Auschwitz, contests the very contingency of canonicity.

POLITICS OF LANGUAGE: DUPLICITY AND SURVIVAL

Poetic language has to first be submitted to Auschwitz

before it can represent a new poetic language-at-the­

limits. It is from this optic that language, its ruptures,

breakdowns and violently forged new boundaries are

represented, in this volume. ·In Aucun de nous ne Reviendra

the figurative tropes which represent language (brutal,

incomprehensible vocality) and silence (glacial, frozen

immobility) serve to highlight the radical alienation of

the individual in the face of the onslaught of the camp on

the human experience and its shattering of the

possibilities of poetic language. Primo Levi encapsulates

this idea when he · comments that 11 [i] t is an obvious

observation that where violence is inflicted on man, it is

also inflicted on language [ ... ] 11 (Levi, 1988: 76) . In Une

Connaissance Inutile, however, representations of language

manifest the way poetics become politics of language.

Thus, the narrator of Une Connaissance Inutile presents the

politics of language in the Lager in an anecdote where the .

author and addressee of a love-letter which is intercepted

are executed by firing squad following interrogation by the 11 Politische Abteilung" . Lily, the prisoner and her fiance

are executed, . '

91

[ ... ] parce que, pour la Gestapo, tout etait code, et les mots d'amour traduisaient forcement des mots d'ordre politiques. [ ... ] Dans la lettre de Lily a son fiance, il y avait cette phrase: << Nous sommes la comme des plantes riches de vie et de seve, comme des plantes qui voudraient pousser et vivre, et je ne peux pas m 'empecher de pens er que ces plan tes ne doivent pas vivre.» C'est un des hommes qui travaillent a la Politische qui nous l 'a dit. (78) [ ••• J because, for the Gestapo, everything was code, and words of' love necessarily translated into words of a political nature. [ ... ] In Lily's letter to her fiancA,. there was this sentence: "We are like plants which are resplendent/rich with life and sap, like plants that would like to grow and live, and I can't prevent myself from thinking that these plants should not live. 11 It was one of the men who works at the Poli tische who told us this.

In the logic of the concentrationary universe language of

love, represented by the love poem, is necessarily

political because language in Auschwitz articulates power

through dissimulation, euphemism and paraphrase.

Representation therefore highlights the ways in which

language intervenes and modulates the interactions of the

prisoner in the camp. Hence, the politics of language

emerges through a narration of the role of language in

relation to the vertical and lateral dispositions of power

in the concentration camp. Moreover, if language is

represented here through descriptions of the prisoner in

relationship with others, it emerges as a mode of organised

resistance to the Nazi system.

In the first paragraph of narrative, entitled "Les

Hommes" (The Men) the narrator describes her and her co­

prisoners / relationships with the men interned at

Auschwitz, we read 11 [n]ous leur [les hommes] jetions des

billets par-dessus le grillage, nous dejouions la

92

surveillance pour echanger avec eux quelques mots. 11 ( 9) (We

used to throw notes to them (the men) through the fence, we

used to evade the guards/surveillance in order to

exchange/swap a few words with them.) Language's

communicative function, that is, dialogue as gesture of

communion which is the human gaze recognising itself in the

other within Auschwitz is read as a necessity for survival

(precisely because of the fatal consequences risked if

discovered) and, as such, as a commodity of exchange.

Besides the risks of discovery which modulates

communication in the Lager, the mutual incomprehensibility

of the inmates' mother tongues compounds the impingement on

communication/communion.

As historical narrative, this volume offers details of

the survivor's daily struggle to live within the death­

camp. Yet it is as literary artifact, that the text bears

witness to the traces of Auschwitz on language. In its

submission to Auschwitz, language bears the indelible trace

of its violent submission to the death-camp. The "grillage"

(wire-fence) becomes the symbolic barrier, the imprinted

trace which encloses language and through which language is

"thrown" in its search for an interlocutor. I would

suggest that the barbed-wire· fence and electrified wire

fence have become symbols of the Shoah in contemporary

cultural representations precisely because they symbolise

the hermetically enclosed and, therefore, impenetrable

experience of the death-camp.

As I have discussed in the previous chapter, if

Auschwitz becomes the locus of assault on humanity and on

the language of humanity, the representation of SS guards

and the Anweiserins in the text is significant. Once again

language and violence are conflated to personify the SS

guards, Anweiserens and Blockaltesters as brutal and

brutalising vocal eruptions, that is, as shrieks and

screams which are violently ejaculated. In turn, this

representation personifies language itself as violent, a

claim supported by the image of language as projectile

93

which is suggested by the gesture of the note throwing to

the men. Thus, their language becomes the symbol of

their brutality:

C' etai t une poli tique allemande {la chef de colonne] , qui hurlai t sans jamais reprendre souffle. Ce que cette femme pouvai t hurler . .. Elle hurlait sans raison visible, elle hurlait en s'agitant, de la tete, des mains I du baton et el le frappai t a tort et a travers I puis cessai t de s'agiter tout en continuant a hurler -

des ordres incomprehensibles et inexecutables --{ ... ] (52-53) It was a German political prisoner [the head of the column] , who shrieked without ever taking a breath. What she was able to shriek ... She shrieked for no clear reason, she shrieked whilst shaking her head, her hands, her truncheon and she struck out wildly and randomly, then she stopped shaking all· the while continuing to shriek incomprehensible and inexecutable orders - - [ ... ]

Nude in a barrack at Birkenau, prior to her transfer

to Raisko, the narrator and some of her compatriots have to

undergo a medical examination and "[u]ne SS revient avec la

chef du block, Allemande hysterique qui ne cesse de hurler

[ ... ] ". (103) ( {a]n SS woman returns with the head of the

block, a hysterical German woman who does not stop

shouting.) Language, violence and non-reason are conflated

and embodied by the "hysterical 11 German perpetrator. In

turn she is seen as possessing a language which is not

enunciated but, rather, which erupts as a barrage of

inarticulate blows which impact upon the very matrix of

language.

Language, characterised by violence, by non-sense and

non-reason is often represented as the dislocated mouth.

Thus, for example, during the transfer of the narrator and

certain of her compatriots from their barracks at Auschwitz

94

I to Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and then on to Ravensbruck

they are driven by "le SS a la sale gueule" (102) (a foul­

mouthed SS) .

The mouth, jaw, tongue and lips become the site of

both rupture and representation of rupture. When "Le

medecin SS nous fait tirer la langue" (103) (The SS doctor

made us pull our tongues) the polysemic play on words which

emerges through the French word "la langue 11 11 the SS

doctor makes us stick out our tongues" as well as "the SS

doctor pulls out/extracts our tongues/language" - highlights

the transformation of language and meaning in the death­

camp and in its representation in the survivor's text, for

the healing and curing associations of the doctor, 11 le

medecin" are immediately subverted by the qualification

"SS 11 , combining to create a new historical referent. The

signification of the image of the narrator who "sticks out

[herJ tongue", is revealed in the way language and its

edification as printed word is used to defy the logic of

Nazi ideology the extraction of the tongue, the

definitive preclusion of inmates bearing witness- which is

to survive, return and bear witness (and hence the gesture

of defiance) . The narrator's tongue is symbolically

restored, her language is restituted but emerges forever

altered on the other side of the 11 grillage". Paul Celan

evokes this idea of language emerging, after Auschwitz

through the intermediary of violence when he notes, in his

famous Bremen speech of 1958, that language "had to go

through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses

of murderous speech. It went through."· (quoted in Colin,

1991:49)

In order to reinforce the isolation of the individual

as part of the systematic assault on his/her humanity as

well as to curtail the possibility of organised resistance,

the circulation of language, that is, communication

verbal and written - inside the Lager is tightly controlled

and necessarily restricted. While all contact with the

outside world for Jews, Gypsies and the Nacht und Nebel

95

politicals is prohibited, within the Lager, it is severely

restricted. Primo Levi comments that it is precisely this

prohibition of communication which most strongly emphasises

his profound sense of alienation in Auschwitz:

The weekly hour when our "political" companions received mail from home was for us the saddest, when we felt the whole burden of being different, estranged, cut off from our country, indeed from the human face. It was the hour when we felt the tattoo burn like a wound, and the certainty that none of us would return overwhelmed us like an avalanche of mud. In any case, even if we had been allowed to write a letter - to whom would we have addressed it? The families of the Jews of Europe were submerged or dispersed or destroyed. {Levi, 1988:81)

Censorship of communication in Auschwitz must be read

in the context, then, of the dehumanising onslaught of the

camp on the individual and as a reinforcement of its

hermetic experience as 11 the kingdorr( of night". (Wiesel,

1958)

The narrator perpetually highlights the

dissimulating nature of language in the camp. She

describes how when she and some · of her compatriots are

transferred to Ravensbruck they are required to sign papers

which state that they have not been maltreated, that they

have not been ill and that they have had all their

possessions returned to them. (104) No doubt, the signs and

legends posted around Auschwitz underline the way that

language is implicated in the deceptive and destabilising

self-presentation of the Lager. Hence, the legend "Arbeit

Macht Frei 11 (Work makes free), appearing above the gates of

Auschwitz, greeting the labour details on their way out and

back in to the camp each day demonstrates how the absurdity

of language functions as mechanism of deception in the

death-camp. Here, the irony of the legend emerges through

its setting in a particular historical and topographical

96

context which, in turn, reveals a self-parodying impulse of

language which has become self-referential. Language

points, in its grotesque parody of bureaucratic modes of

representation in civic discourse, to nothing but itself as

both meaningless and contentless.

The essential unfamiliarity and strangeness of

language submitted to the will of the concentrationary

universe, is noted by the narrator in the first paragraph

of the chapter, Les Hammes, "Nous 1 es aimions. Nous 1 e

leur disions des yeux1 jamais des levres. Cela leur aurait

semble etrange". (9) (We loved them. We told them this

with our eyes, never with our lips. That would have seemed

strange/unfamiliar/foreign to them.) Thus, to write and

say love in Auschwitz is to find a new way of writing and

speaking about emotion for the instruments of enunciation, 11 des levres 11 (the lips), are paralysed by both a loss of

language caused by the definitive and absolute rupture with

the past and with referential language.

II. MOLIERE READ THROUGH AUSCHWITZ

Language emerges f rem the Lager altered. As such

testimonial narrative as communicative and performati ve

impulses are recast after Auschwitz. Through the constant

interplay of narrative and intertext Delbo's post-Auschwitz

narrative rereads and recasts pre-Auschwitz literature in

the light of the Auschwitz experience, a gesture which

resonates both with Shoshana Felman' s claim of crisis

marking all post-Auschwitz artistic production as well as

with canonic insertion of that production (Felman & Laub,

1992). It is the literary persona of French classicist

playwright, Moliere and his final play, Le Malade

imaginaire1 (and further in the narrative, Moliere' s Le

Misanthrope) which become the structuring reference points

of this volume's meditation on the nature of relationships

and intertextual dialogue after Auschwitz and the

97

understandings of testimonial narrative that it produces.

The narrator recounts how after being transferred to

Raisko (where the living conditions were more bearable) her

compatriots and herself, racked by typhus, hunger and

exhaustion, decide to stage a piece of theatre. In

Auschwitz, inversion of the pre-Holocaust

social/political/cultural order, Moliere's le Malade

imaginaire (the imaginary sick I the hypochondriac) , reread

and rewritten in the concentrationary space of rupture of

reality with the imaginary, becomes 1 'imaginaire malade, an

illness of the imaginary, that is, an illness of the

imaginary mode. In this way Delbo creates an intertext

which presents the covert rewriting and staging of

Moliere's dramatic piece as an engagement with the notion

of un-imagine-ability as well as with the concept of

psychological resistance in the camp.

Before narrating the event of reconstructing this play

from memory and staging it, with all the danger this

necessarily entailed, the narrator describes how, in

Auschwitz, in the sustained assault against the individual

and his/her humanity in the mud, blood and diarrhea, the

imaginary mode, the intellectual mode and the modes of

inner life which formerly sustained, fortified and

strengthened the individual are the first resources to

dissipate, to prove to be illusory.

Vous direz qu 'on peut tout enlever a un etre humain sauf sa faculte de pens er et d' imaginer. Vous ne savez pas. On peut faire d'un etre humain un squelette ou gargouille la diarrhee, lui 6ter le temps de penser, la force de penser. L'imaginaire est le premier luxe du corps qui re<;oit assez de nourriture, jouit d'une frange de temps libre, dispose de rudiments pour fa<;onner ses reves. A Auschwitz on ne revai t pas, on delirait. (90) You will say that one can take everything from a human being except for her faculty to think and to imagine. You do not know. One can

98

make a human being into a skeleton where diarrhea gurgles, take away her time to think, her strength to think. The imaginary is the first luxury of the body which receives enough nourishment, enjoys a margin of free time, is furnished with the basics with which to build her dreams . In Auschwitz one did not dream, one had deliria.

It is no small irony that in 1673 at the third

representation of Le Malade imaginaire, Moliere, the

playwright, had a seizure and died whilst performing in the

role of the protagonist, Argan, the hypochondriac himself.

This last dramatic work of Moliere is a parody of the fear

of illness - a metaphor for bourgeois values of the time -

and the unethical and protectionist practices of medical

science which exploits those fears - a metaphor for the

unchallenged foundations of knowledge. The inversion of

historical fact and dramatic fiction conflate the borders

of real and imaginary which in turn serves to highlight the

dissonance of a narration of theatre set in Auschwitz at

the same time as it underlines the very real danger -

certain death - of being discovered in the process of

staging the play.

The narrator expresses little doubt that her transfer

to the laboratory at Raisko contributes in no small way to

her group's ability to stage the dramatic piece. Moreover,

the staging of the piece symbolises a momentary reprieve

from certain death since it is a consequence of

approximately one hundred prisoners from Birkenau,

Auschwitz II (the death-camp), who are chemists,

biologists, botanists, agriculturalists, translators,

illustrators and laboratory workers being transferred to

Raisko. As such, it is an emblem of the coincidental or

"unheroic" nature of resistance to the camp. In this way

the narrator suggests that pre-Holocaust narrative models

of heroic resistance are inappropriate if we are to

understand what exactly constitutes resistance in the

Lager.

99

Thus, she is part

[ ... ] d' un peti t groupe qui avai t survecu a six mois du camp de la mort et avait ete envoye a quelque distance de la, dans ce commando priviligie. Il y avait des paillasses pour dormir, de l 'eau pour se laver. Le travail etait moins dur, quelquefois a l'abri, quelquefois assis. [ ... ] [A]pres quelques temps, nous reprenions apparence humaine. (88-89) [ ... ] of a little group who had survived six months of the death camp and had been sent some distance from there, in this privileged commando. There were straw mattresses on which to sleep, water with which to wash oneself. The work was less hard, sometimes under shelter, sometimes sitting. [ ... ] [A] fter some time, we took on a human appearance again.

Human appearance translates into active resistance by

exploiting the benefits of one free hour each evening and

sometimes Sundays in order to stage a dramatic production.

As literary critic, Ellen Fine, comments, "[i]n a dominion

designed to annihilate all traces of the thinking mind,

literature became a vehicle of human communion, a weapon of

transcendence, and an act of defiance." (Fine, 1986:79)

As the day of the illicitly staged spectacle approaches,

the troupe make a poster, a notice for the play. The

narrator asks the rhetorical question whether a poster

should be necessary if those who could attend (inmates of

those barracks) already knew.

C' est qu 'enfin nous sommes dans l 'illusion. Une affiche en couleurs ou on lit : << Le Malade imaginaire, d'apres Moliere, par Claudette. Costumes de Cecile. Mise en scene de Charlotte. Agencement scenique et accessoires de Carmen. >> Suit la distribution, avec Lulu dans le role d'Argan. Mais notre piece etait en quatre actes. Nous n'etions pas

100

arrivees a retrouver la coupe de Moliere. (92-93) It is because, finally, we are in the illusion. A poster in colours where one reads, "Le Malade imaginaire, according to Moliere, by Claudette. Costumes by Cecile. Directed by Charlotte. Stage direction and accessories by Carmen. 11 Followed by the cast with Lulu in the role of Argan. But our play was in four acts. We did not succeed in recalling Moliere's interval.

Claudette, compatriot and French political prisoner, who as

an illustrator has access to pencil and paper in this

biogenetic, agricultural laboratory begins to transcribe

le Malade imaginaire ("d'apres Moliere", according to

Moliere) from memory. In this way Moliere is written

through a double intermediary : memory and Auschwitz, a

writing through which can only radically transform the

text. It is precisely because 11 nous sommes dans

l 'illusion" (we are in the illusion) that art emerges

altered, that "[dJans l 'obscurite,

prenait une etrange resonance. 11 (92)

une intonation juste

([i]n the darkness, a

correct intonation took on a strange resonance.) Trans-

scription of dramatic narrative, in this context, is the

literal passage of Moliere and his dramatic text through

the "grillage" of Auschwitz.

Writing, rehearsing and staging Moliere in Auschwitz

becomes a task fraught with practical difficulties which

include the inability to access any theatrical artifice

with which to accentuate the illusion. As the narrator

points out, being ill with typhus, being racked by hunger

and rehearsing in a dark and frozen barrack after work and

after supper 11 [ ••• ] puisqu 'on disai t le souper pour deux

cents grammes de pain dur et sept grammes de margarine

[ ••• ] 11 (92) (since one said supper for two hundred grams of

hard bread and seven grams of margerine) further underlines

these difficulties. In this way the shift from reality to

dramatic fiction is inverted and the dramatic devices which

101

accentuate the boundaries between the two before Auschwitz,

now cause them to blur. This is highlighted when the

narrator describes the way the doctors' faces, "bilieux a merveille"(94) (marvellously bilious-looking), are made up

in 11 [u]ne poudre jaune vert, dont je ne sais pas la

composition, peut-etre un insecticide [ ... ] 11 (93) (a yellow

green powder of which I do not know the composition,

perhaps an insecticide) .

Clearly the staging of Moliere in Auschwitz {and later

in the narrative, in Ravensbruck) comes to represent the

submission of the performative gesture - here, the dramatic

text to the historical cleavage symbolised by the

Auschwitz experience. As such, the theatrical gesture -

symbolically grafted onto the very testimonial narrative

which attests to that rupture - 11 performs 11 as its own

testimony to life in the concentration camp. It is also

Moliere, who, although a critic of his own epoch, is the

symbolic historical representative of the Classicist Mind

and its cartesian conception of language and reason as a

stable unchallenged syntagmatic relationship. This

heritage is, in turn, subverted, reread and reperformed in

Auschwitz 11 [ • .'.] sans que les cheminees aient cesse de

fumer leur fumee de chair humaine [ .. J 11 { 96) . ( [ ... ] without

the chimneys ceasing to smoke their smoke of human.

flesh[ ... ]) Emphasised by the representation of the

writing of the play within the Auschwitz laboratory which,

as a laboratory represents the space where the paradigm of

rationalist-empiricist thought reaches its apotheosis, the

classicist and later rationalist conception of language, as

system of fixed and stable meanings, is cast in doubt

through its submission to the Lager. By narrating the

production of the play against the background of crematoria

burning human flesh, the tropes of figurative language and

artificiality of theatrical devices refer self-consciously

and perpetually back to their own illusory status as

artifice.

102

TOMBSTONES AND TEXTS: MEMORY AS RESISTANCE, AS SURVIVAL

In the description of and response to their triumphant

production of le Malade imaginaire the narrator states that

{c] 'est magnifique parce que quelques repliques de Moliere,

ressurgies intactes de notre memoire, revivent inalterees,

chargees de leur pouvoir magique et inexplicable. 11 ( 95)

([i]t is magnificent because some of Moliere's lines, which

resurged intact in our memory relive, unaltered, charged

with their magical and inexplicable power.) Words, which

have become inadequate signif iers and constantly point to

their own demise as stable referents within literary

narrative are at the same time a representation to a return

to a reciting, commemorating and memorialising language.

It is the ability for the literary tradition to function

orally as a literal memorising and memorialising aid, that

is evoked by the magical and inexplicable power of which

the narrator speaks.

The first volume characterises the loss of language as

a crisis of naming. This volume, however, anticipates the

loss of language as an amnesia, a forgetting. As such, the

narrator volume characterises the fear of memory-loss

precisely as a compulsion to name, to date, to locate, to

recall. Thus, according to the narrator, to remember the

literary text is to remain in language. This concern with

the loss of memory is an expression of the effects of

trauma on the faculty of recall and a narration of the

past:

Je pourrais dire la date exacte puisque CI etai t le soixante-septieme jour de notre arrivee et que nous avions pris beaucoup de peine a compter ainsi les jours a partir de l 'arrivee qui etait le mercredi 27 janvier, pour essayer au moins de nous rappeler les dates. Les dates? Quelles dates et quelle importance cela avai t-il que ce soi t vendredi ou samedi, 1 'anni versaire de ceci ou de

103

cela? Les dates qu'il fallait se rappeler, c'etait la mart d'Yvonne ou la mart de Suzanne, la mart de Rdsette ou celle de Marcelle . . Nous voulions toujours etre en mesure de dire: << Une telle est morte le ... >> quand on nous le demanderait si jamais nous revenions. Aussi tenions-nous compte scrupuleux des jours. Il y avait de longues discussions entre nous quand nous n'etions pas d'accord sur le compte. Mais il me semble que notre compte etait juste. Nous verifiions cons tammen t : «Non, les cbiens, c'etait avant-bier, pas bier.>> Le dimancbe, les colonnes ne sortaient pas du camp. Cela donnait un repere et permettait de retablir le compte quand nous avians perdu le fil des jours. (57) I was able to say the exact date since it was the sixty ninth day since we arrived and because we had made a great effort to count thus the days from arrival, which was Wednesday 27 January, in order to at least try to remember the dates. The dates? Which dates and what difference would it make if the birthday of so-and-so was on a Friday or Saturday? The dates we had to remember, were Yvonne's death, Suzanne's death, Rosette's death or Marcelle's. We always wanted to be in a position to say "So-and-so died on the ... " when we would be asked if we ever returned. We also kept a fastidious/meticulous count bf the days. We used to have long discussions between ourselves when we disagreed on a count. But it seems to me that our count was correct. We constantly verified: "No, the dogs, that was the day before yesterday, not yesterday." On Sundays, the columns never left the camp. That provided a point of reference and allowed us to reestablish the count when we had lost the thread.

What is narrated is a concern for the very testimonial

project itself. Poetry, drama, telephone numbers, dates

provide the undiscriminated material of memory precisely in

104

order to bear witness after return. In this way, the

narrator's compulsion to remember anticipates the

survivor's self-imposed injunction to bear witness.

In relation to an edification of memory as the

anticipation of a testimonial narrative, the literal

connotations of intertextual dialogue, of citation and

rewriting come to be revealed. As a narrative which

implicates other texts by citation, it is the simultaneous

narration of a re-citation. Intertextuality, thus, is

resuscitated through its engagement with orality. The

literary text is presented, then, as an aid to memory, as

the projection of a framework which would somehow offer

narrative continuity after Auschwitz, when that continuity

is breached. The received literary tradition is invoked by

the narrator as a "mnemotechnics" (Yates, 1966: 11), a

memorisation technique. As re-citation, intertextuality

functions as an egalitarian impulse which provides an non­

discriminating text-based resource for memorisation. In

this way, the text functions as a challenge to the elitist

power-knowledge significations of canonic organisation.

The narrator comments how the naming of places, dating

of events, recreation of the topographic relations of metro

maps and recitation of both poetry and drama from recall

manifest a disregard for discriminating against different

registers and genres which provide memory's matrix. She

frames her re-citation exercises as a fear of losing her

memory:

Depuis Auschwitz, j'avais peur de perdre la memoire. Perdre la memoire, c'est se perdre soi-meme, c'est n'etre plus soi. Et j 'avais invente toutes sortes d'exercices pour faire travailler ma memoire: me rappeler tous les numeros de telephone que j'avais sus, toutes les stations d'une ligne de metro, toutes les boutiques de la rue Caumartin, entre 1 1 Athenee et le metro Havre-Caumartin. J'avais reussi, au prix d'efforts infinis, a me rappeler cinquante-sept poemes. J' avais tellement peur de les voir

105

SI echapper que je me les reci tais tOUS chaque jour, tous l'un apres l'autre, pendant 1 1 appel. J' avais eu tant de peine a 1 es retrouver ! Il m 1 avai t f allu parfois des jours pour un seul vers, pour un seul mot, qui refusaient de revenir. (124) Since Auschwitz, I am afraid of losing my memory. To lose ones's memory is to lose oneself, it is to no longer be oneself. And I invented all sorts of exercises to make my memory work: I recalled all the telephone numbers which I had known, all the stations on a metro line, all the shops on rue Caumartin between the Athenee and Havre-Caumartin metro station. I had succeeded, at the price of endless effort, to recall fifty seven poems. I was so afraid to see· them flee that I recited them all every day, all one after the other, during the roll­calls. I had gone through much pain/effort to find them again. Sometimes it would take days to recover a single line, a single word which refused to come back to me.

Literary text, as a narrative aid to reconstitute

the processes of "common memory" which, anticipating the

consecration of a testimonial narrative, is attached value

in the context of the Lager because in its defiance of the

dehumanisation campaign of the Lager, it accrues to it the

potential for resistance. It is in the light of the

signification of resistance that the narrator recounts how

she trades her ration of bread for a copy of Le Misanthrope

(the Miser}, another of Moliere's plays. Charged with the

responsibility of reading the text to her compatriots, she

receives a portion of each woman's bread ration to make up

the one that she had bartered.

The reading of the text functions as a collective and

shared gesture of psychological and emotional upliftment,

centred around the vocalising voice. Memorising the entire

text, however, is revealed as an individual and solitary

gesture which once again interrupts communion. This

emphasises the isolation of the individual in the Lager,

106

stripped of the emotional and psychological resources of

the past, while simultaneously constituting an emotional

and psychological resource, however tenuous, within the

Lager. This is illustrated when the narrator describes how

memorisation exercises provide an emotional/psychological 11 shield 11 in order to endure roll-call:

J'ai appris Le Misanthrope par coeur, un fragment chaque soir, que je me repetais a l'appel du lendemain matin. Bientot j 'ai su toute la piece, qui durai t presque tout "1 1 appel. Et jusqu'au depart, j'ai garde la brochure dans ma gorge. (125) I learnt Le Misanthrope by heart, one fragment each evening, which I repeated at the roll-call of the following morning. And right until leaving, I kept the booklet under my collar/in my throat.

If we recall philosopher Hannah Arendt's definition of the

misanthrope as someone who 11 finds no one with whom he 'cares

to share the world, that he regards nobody as worthy of

rejoicing with him in the world and nature and the cosmos"

(Arendt, 1973: 32) / the irony of the narration of the

reading for her compatriots is emphasised. As a form of

resistance, then, the function of the literary text is two­

fold: as a sharing, a communion of inmates, it functions as

a collectively asserted resistance against the logic of

Arendt' s misanthrope; as an internal resource for the

individual it functions as an assertion of the will to

remain, against all odds, human (Fine, 1986) .

Framed as a meditation on the nature of relationships

in the camps, interpersonal and intertextual, this volume

consecrates a narration which engages with and addresses

notions of what constitutes resistance in the Lager, how

discourse of emotion is politicised and how canonicity is

central to the transmissibility of the past as well as to

the debated on historicisation.

107

CHAPTER FOUR

MESURE DE NOS JOURS

Douleur, elle desunit, mais non pas d'une maniere visible (par une dislocation ou une disjonction qui serait spectaculaire) : d'une maniere silenciuse, faisant taire le bruit derriere les paroles. La douleure perpetuelle, perdue, oubliee. Ellene rend pas la pensee douloureuse. Ellene se laisse pas porter secours. Sour ire pensif du visage non devisageable que le ciel la terre disparus, le jour la nuit passes l'un dans l'autre, laissent a celui qui ne regarde plus et qui, voue au retour, ne partira jamais. (Maurice Blanchot L'Ecriture du Desastre, p.220)

THE SURVIVOR'S LAST WORD

After attempting to present memory of the

concentration camp experience and its conflicting

encounters with transmissability in the first and second

volumes of the trilogy, the narrator returns, in the third

and final volume of the trilogy, entitled, Mesure de nos

Jours (Measure of our Days), to the survivors themselves in

an attempt to examine the ways in which the survivor is

implicated in narration of the silences, fragments and

discontinuities of Holocaust narrative.

The vignettes of Mesure de nos Jours are named after

the survivors whose post-Auschwitz stories constitute the

ensuing narrative. This gesture of commemorative naming:

Gilberte, Mado, Marie-Louise, Ida, Loulou, Poupette,

Germaine, Jacques, Gaby, Louise and Fran9oise, recalls the

uniquely and painfully positioned survivor, who, emerging

from the Lager alive, is passed over for the commemorative

dedication reserved for the 11 true witnesses", the dead.

Presented as (primarily) a collection of interviews in

the first person, narrative voice functions in this text as

the symbolic restitution of the "last word" to the

survivor. Hence, this volume comes to re-embody Holocaust

memory, disappropriated as experience from the survivor by

competing narratives of collectivised and totalised

versions of the past.

testament to trauma,

In this way, this text emerges as a

to the difficult, and sometimes,

108

impossible task of mending a shattered life, and to the

very materiality of the consequences of surviving and

remembering.

Each micronarrative, each survivor's story, comes· to

be shown as emblematic, in its individual way, of the

rupture, the discontinuities, the ruins, the scars and the

phantoms which both haunt and animate the survivors who are

often presented as merely 11 imitating" the gestures of

living, expressed as "ce moi-la qui imite la vie" 24 (47)

(that me there who imitates life} Written more than

twenty years after the war, this text is seminal in the

readings it produces which relate to the role of memory and

language in the survivor's post-Auschwitz existence.

By presenting the survivor as doomed-to-survive, that

is, survival as pathology, I would say that Delbo's

narrator contests the narrative hegemony of Holocaust

testimonies which, in their linearity, stable subjectivity

and seamless recourse to a unitary Memory, construct tragic

and heroic narratives of inspiration, courage, triumph.

The marginalised voices represented by these

micronarratives articulate moral ambivalence regarding

survival, survival as terminal illness; return as amnesia,

and the experience of being shunned by local communities on

return. Their narratives contest the possibilities of

heroic action at the same time as they challenge facile

labels of passivity and victimhood. As such these self­

presentations come to challenge the inspirational altruism

of both heroic survivor narratives as well as Resistance

narratives of courage and bravery. Without diminishing the

immense importance of such narratives, or of their power

precisely as testimony to astonishing human courage and

bravery, I would say that this volume's presentations of

the survivor and his/her existence, body and memory,

constitute, rather, representations of rejected or

historically silenced versions of survival.

24 All quotations from Mesure de nos jours, in this chapter, will be referenced by page number only.

109

SURVIVOR MEMORY: THE TRAIN BACK AND THE BURIAL

Towards the end of the text an event is recounted by

Charlotte, the fictional/autobiographical narrator of all

three instalments of the trilogy, which is central to the

representations of the survivor in this narrative. The

survivors / whose names appear throughout the trilogy as co­

deportees and inmates ·in Auschwitz, Raisko, and

Ravensbruck, reunite almost two decades later in a vignette

significantly entitled "L'enterrement" (185) (The burial).

The title of this micro-narrative symbolically raises the

question as to whether the past could be buried, whether

memories could be laid to rest. The representations of the

survivor which precede this vignette, suggest clearly that

repression of the past only momentarily precedes its

return. 25

The reunited survivors take a train journey in order

to attend the funeral of Germaine, survivor/compatriot and

friend who has died of a terminal illness. The

conversations which are narrated during this final train

journey gather together the conceptual strands presented in

the preceding narratives. Train journey, death, disease,

loss and mourning - signif iers whose representations have

been subverted after the Shoah - are superficially restored

as cultural and social referents. However, since language

has emerged through the grillage of the Auschwitz

experience, the irony inherent in these

generates another accumulation of meanings

signif iers

which are

constituted in relation to the preceding narratives. In

this way these referents can be read as the constitution in

the narrative process itself of self-referential tropes of

a common memory of Auschwitz.

The central motif which unites these survivors is

Germaine's terminal illness followed by her death. Perhaps

25 See also Lacapra, 1994 and Friedlander, 1993 and 1994.

110

the representation of terminal illness can be understood as

metaphoric reinsertion of the somatic presence of the

survivor as the re-embodied memory of the-disfigurement and

breakage which precedes his/her emergence from the Lager.

I would also argue that the trope of terminal illness could

be understood as a representation of the memory of

Auschwitz as terminal disease. Such a representation

gestures to the unredemptive materiality of the pain,

trauma and loneliness of the survivor. Thus, Louise

narrates how her husband's aches, pains, ailments and

diseases cast him, twenty years later, as the eternal

deportee and their home as an infirmary. (176)

Marceline's story is the narration of survival as the

repression of memory which returns each year in her body,

as her "anniversaire de typhus" (183) (typhus anniversary).

She recounts how her husband's scientific theories and

explanations of the Holocaust translate into the belief

that the psychological and physiological functioning of the

human being is able to overcome even the most extreme

trauma. "La preuve qu'il en est ainsi, he says, c'est que

tu es revenue" (183) (The proof that is so is that you have

returned) and that she should not be a

"prisonnier" (prisoner) of "[c] es souvenirs terribles"

(these terrible memories). (183) Yet every year, at more or

less the same time,

[ ... ] je suis prise d'une grosse fievre qui dure des jours. Aucun medicament n'y fait rien. Les analyses de laboratoire, les radiographies ne revelent rien. Mon medecin y perd son latin. Ma maladie n'a pas de nom. [ ... ] C'est inexplicable. Cela commence toujours de la meme' fac;:on violent mal de tete, maux de ventre, temperature qui monte d'un coup. (183) I am gripped by a great fever which lasts for days. No medication can do anything. Laboratory analyses and X-rays do not reveal anything. My doctor loses his Latin to it. My sickness does ·not have a name. It is

' 111

unexplainable. It always begins in the same way: a violent headache, sore stomach and a temperature which rises all of a sudden.

In, a radical inversion of the reading produced in the

second volume's presentation of Le Malade imaginaire,

repressed and traumatised memories re-emerge after

Auschwitz in the body, locus of deep memory. If, in that

volume, the dramatic narrative serves as a mnemonic of

memory performed in the Lager, it is evoked in the present

text rather as an amnesia. This micronarrative is

essentially the narration of the need to forget the memory

of Auschwitz and to continue despite surviving Auschwitz.

As a project of amnesia, of forgetting the past, it is

disrupted each year by this mystery illness which

ressembles the typhus that the survivor has had in the

camp. Here, Auschwitz as "imaginary" illness explodes the

positivist epistemologies of medical science whose

diagnostic labels in Latin are silenced in the face of

incurable, inexplicable illness which is the return of the

deep memory of Auschwitz.

Readings which invoke survival as a "condition", as a

pathology, urge the addressee to contemplate the difficult

and painful assumptions

imposed on the survivor

{social and moral) which are

and the culturally reproduced

representations of the survivor and of victimhood. Hence,

in this final instalment, the trilogy's title, Auschwitz et

Apres, takes yet another meaning in its polysemic

accumulation of signification: after Auschwitz the survivor

is doomed to bear the traces of their experience in a post­

Lager milieu that reinforces isolation and the stigma of a

rejected otherness.

BURNT BOOKS, DEFUNCT WORDS: RETURN AS A FORGETTING

There is a section in La Memoire et les Jours {Delbo,

112

1985) where the narration of the survivor's return and of

his/her sense of possessing ruined or incoherent memories

is in the form of poetic verse. The final stanza of the

poem provides an important key which links the second and

third volumes of Auschwitz et Apres and which outlines an

ambivalence in the narrator's experience of memory, of the

recollecting impulse, subsequent to return:

Amon retour j'ai relu les poemes de Blaise Cendrars Je n'ai pas retrouve le vers qui avait affleure transf orme a ma memoire de la-bas. (40)

On my return I reread the poems of Blaise Cendrars I did not retrieve the verse which had blossomed transformed by my memory of over there

Central to this apparent repositioning of memory after

Auschwitz is the dispersion of literary or poetic language

as the means of "owning" or engaging one's memory, narrated

in the previous volume. In that volume of the trilogy, the

role of literature and of figurative language is shown to

be an edification of memory, through the narration of the

mechanics of memory, against the obliterating forces of the

Lager. For the narrator, the loss of memory in the Lager

"c'est se perdre soi-meme, c'est n'etre plus soi." (Delbo,

1970b: 124) (is to lose oneself, is to no longer be

oneself). Thus, memory in Auschwitz provides an

overarching framework which provides a tenuous but

important form of continuity "pour nous garder, pour ne

pas nous laisser entamer, pour ne pas nous laisser

aneantir." (52) (to keep ourselves, to not let ourselves be

worn down, to not let ourselves be wiped out) This poem,

however, testifies rather to a displacement of the memory

which had been evoked in the camps. Now, poetic language,

113

in its self-presentation of the traces of Auschwitz and

deferral in perpetuity to the Lager, can be metaphorically

symbolised by the French poet's name which - bearing the

trace of its submission to the Lager and being forcibly

wrought through the simultaneous act of rereading and

translating - attests to poetic language's inability to

figure that experience. Poetic language passes through the

fires of the crematoria, through the "blaze" of the

Holocaust and emerges, like the victims, as "cinders", as

the testifying trace of remains. Hence, once the narrator

passes through the camp and returns, the memory that she

thought she "possessed" reveals itself, along with the poet

and the language which frames him, to be illusory. Poetic

language, symbolically resumed in the poet's name, is

reduced, like the survivor's memory, to cinders, to ashes:

a negative presence that can only signal itself by signing

its perpetual absence (Derrida, 1991: 39) . 26

It is precisely in this refashioning of the ruined

morphology of memory / which · emerges through the

presentation of an ambiguous memory in Mesure de nos jours,

that survivor memory is revealed, immediately after return,

as an anguished and tortured forgetting. The moment of

return marks a forgetting of everything that preceded

Auschwitz. The narrator expresses this forgetting thus:

Avec difficulte, par un grand effort de ma memoire --mais pourquoi dire: effort de la memoire, puisque je n 'avais pl us de memo ire? - - par un effort que je ne sais comment nommer, j'ai essaye de me souvenir des gestes qu 'on doi t faire pour reprendre la forme d' un vi vant dans la vie. Marcher, parler, repondre aux questions, dire ou l'on veut aller, y aller. J'avais oublie. L'avais-je

26 Significantly Derrida's text is constituted as a polylogue examination into the presence, in voice-as-body and text-as-body, of the signifying presence of cinders.

114

jamais su? Je ne voyais ni comment me prendre ni par ou commencer. (11) With difficulty, through a great effort of my memory - - but why say "effort of memory" if I no longer had a memory? -- through an effort which I do not know what to identify as, I tried to remember the gestures which are made in order to take on t;:.he appearance of a living person who is alive? To walk, talk, answer questions, say where I want to go and go there. I had forgotten. Had I ever known? I knew neither how to start nor where to begin.

The discontinuity of the Auschwitz experience is signalled

as a breach with the anteriority of existing reference

points which is, in turn, anticipated by a break with both

words and gesture. As such language and action or the very

way of being in the world is interrupted by the absolute

incoherence of such an experience. Moreover, the

presentation of a pre-Auschwitz memory which is wiped out

contains the implicit suggestion that the concentration

camp is the moment of the survivor's ontogenesis, an

originating moment which radiates outwards from itself as

a new beginning. Thus Gilberte responds to a repatriated

deportee's question of "D'ou es-tu, toi?" (28) ("And you,

where are you from?") in order to arrange her journey home

with the response "D'Auschwitz" (28) ("From Auschwitz").

Mado presents Auschwitz as an untransgressable spacio­

temporal boundary, an originating moment with no

anteriority:

La-bas, nous avions tout notre passe [ ... ]. Chacun a raconte sa vie mille et mille fois, a ressuscite son enfance, le temps de ·la liberte et du bonheur pour s 'assurer qu 'il l 'avai t vecu, qu'il avait bien ete celui qui'il racontait. Notre passe nous a ete sauvegarde et rassurance. Et depuis que je suis rentree, tout ce que j'etais avant, tous mes souvenirs d'avant, tout s'est dissout, defait.

115

On dirai t que je l 'ai usee la-bas. D 'avant, il ne me reste rien. [. .. J Aujourd'hui, mes souvenirs, mon passe c'est la-bas. Mes retours en arriere ne franchissent jamais cette borne. Ils y butent. (SO} Over there, we had our entire past. Each of us recounted her life time after time, resuscitated her childhood, time of freedom and happiness in order to assure herself that it had been lived, that it had indeed been herself who recounted it. Our past was our safeguard, our assurance. And since I have returned, everything that I had been before, all my memories of before, everything has dissolved, is ruined. One would say that I used it up there. From before, nothing remains. [ ... J Today, all my memories, my past, are from over there. My flashbacks never cross over this boundary. They stumble against it.

In a projection of the way that representation will

emerge through conunon memory, language and its lexicon of

words, like books, are 11 things 11, material artifacts that

the narrator can only employ much later to describe her

experience. Over against this reference to the historical

consciousness implicit in common memory, the historical

moment of' return is narrated as conversely a moment of a

"suspension d'existence" (12} (suspension of existence).

Significantly this memory is represented as 11 l 'epoque ou il

n'y avait pas de mots." (13} (the era when there were no

words} .

Importantly, it

literary text which

is once again

reveals the way

the trope of

that language

the

is

implicated in representing memory by emerging as the very

site of a forgetting. Loss of memory and loss of language

are articulated as an inability to discern what books

represent, what activity they necessitate,· what meaning

116

they yield, and what role they perform. During the time

following her return, the narrator writes,

je regardais ces livres sans faire de relation entre des livres et la lecture. Des objets sans usage? Et puis je les oubliais et je retournais a mon absence" ( 14) I used to look at these books without making a connection between books and reading. Objects without a use? And then I used to forget about them and return to my absence.

I would suggest that precisely by framing the loss of

language and memory as a calling into question of the

presence and function of the book, material and cultural

artifact which comes through Auschwitz altered, unfamiliar,

the literary text itself becomes a metonym for the

explosion of epistemological frameworks through which

meanings are produced.

The absolute alterity of the book object can be

understood to be a contestation of the very ways we read

the post-Auschwitz world whose socio-cultural protocols,

underpinned by Enlightenment notions of the contractual

relation of the individual with knowledge and its reality.

For the returning survivor these protocols are meaningless.

So the books are placed on the table near the headboard and

"restaient la sans que j 'aie seulement 1 'idee de les

prendre. Longtemps, longtemps, les livres sont restes la,

a ma portee, hors de ma portee. Longtemps. II (14) .

(remained there without the idea of picking them up even

enter my mind). Visitors, meanwhile, come and go bearing

gifts of books and flowers, objects which are clearly

described as having lost any referential signification for

the survivor in this "present sans realite" (14) (present

stripped of reality} .

I would say, Adorne's original dictum - even in the

117

light of its reformulated expression - that to write poetry

after Auschwitz is barbaric resonates powerfully in the

narrator's presentation of Auschwitz as the eternal and

definitive replacement of the purely poetic dimensions of

the imaginary mode. Thus, in a succession of interrogative

statements, which preface the narration of an episode where

the narrator/survivor picks up her first book after

returning, she asks:

Qu'est-ce qui n'est pas a cote? N'ai­je plus rien a trouver dans les livres? Sont-ils taus repetition futile, description jolie et imagee, suite de mots sans poids? (16) What is not beside? Did I no longer have anything to find in books? Are they all futile repetition, pretty description full of imagery, the result of empty words?

The exercise in reading produces its own answer as a

response to its own questions as well as to Adorno' s

proposition. Once again, what is at stake in representing

Auschwitz and, now, the narration of survival and of return

is the inability to find stable meaning. Survival, here,

highlights the radical contingency of language, of the

production of meaning. After Auschwitz reality has

outstripped its own ability to be represented and words,

having been implicated in the reality of Auschwitz, are no

longer innocent. Expressing this idea thus, the narrator

comments that,

[t]out etait faux, visages et livres, tout me montrait sa faussete et j'etais desesperee d'avoir perdu toute capacite d'illusion et de reve, toute permeabilite a l'imagination, a l'explication. Voila ce qui, de moi, est mart a Auschwitz. Voila ce qui fait de moi un spectre. (17) [e]verything was false, faces and

118

books, everything showed me its falseness and I despaired at having lost my capacity for illusion and for dreaming, all permeability of the imagination, of explanation. This is what, in me, died in Auschwitz. This is what makes me into a spectre.

DISCONTINUITIES OF SURVIVAL

A. DEEP MEMORY AND DREAMS OF RETURN TO AUSCHWITZ

The survival of an event in extremis, its effects on

language, identity, physical and mental health as well as

on memory inform the representation of the post-Auschwitz

existence which is narrated in this text.

Significantly, one of the tropes of deep memory - the

memory of extreme trauma which collapses narration and

projects the survivor back to the Lager - employed in this

text is that of recurring nightmares. Deep memory emerges

in these nightmares as the enactment of the endless return

to the camp. The dream of return to a pre-Auschwitz

existence, the longed for reason to survive in order to

return (Frankel, 1963) which had animated the dreams of

inmates in Auschwitz recurs after liberation as a dream of

an inverted return. After Auschwitz, the dream-images lead.

back to the Lager. As we have seen in Chapter One, as

tropes of the disruptions of deep memory in the

reconstructed life-world of the survivor, displacing

nightmares of impending return to Auschwitz are recounted

time and again in survivor testimonies.

During the train journey to Germaine' s funeral, a

survivor recounts how "quand j'etais la-bas, je revais que

j'etais a la maison et, depuis que je suis rentree, je reve

que je suis la-bas." (201) (when I was there, I used to

119

dream that I was at home, since I have returned, I dream

that I am there.) Another survivor describes a recurring

nightmare which presents the survivor's relationship to the

past as a suspension of free will and individual choice:

Je suis en prison. On me laisse sortir sur parole et le soir, je reviens conune je l'avais promis apres avoir eu la tentation de m'evader toute la journee, apres avoir essaye de perdre le Chemin. Je n'y reussis jamais, le chem in abou tit touj ours a 1 a prison. Toujours le meme theme, dans des decors differents: tan tot la Sante, tant6t Romainville, tant6t une batisse que je ne connais pas, tant6t le camp. Le plus affreux, c'est le camp. Tu imagines cela, sortir d'Auschwitz et y retourner de soi-meme? C'est si horrible au moment ou je franchis les barbeles et ou je me rends compte que l'occasion de sortir ne se representera jamais plus; c'est si oppressant que je veux crier et je ne peux pas crier parce que la poitrine me fait mal. (200) I am in prison. I am allowed out on parole and in the evening, I come back as I had promised to do after being tempted to run away the entire day, after having tried to lose the way. I never manage to succeed, the path always .leads to/ends at the prison. Always the same theme, in different settings: sometimes la Sante, sometimes Romainville, sometimes an unfamiliar edifice, sometimes the camp. The most hideous is the camp. Can you imagine that, leaving Auschwitz and returning there by oneself? At that moment when I cross the barbed-wire, it so horrible and I realise that the opportunity to leave will never present itself, it is so oppressive that I want to shout and I cannot shout because my chest hurts me.

120

Implicit in this narrated sequence is the circular

trajectory of the dream consciousness which anticipates

freedom and imprisonment as successive and alternative

modes of experience which radiate away from and back to

Auschwitz. Through the suspension of free will, the dream

presents the post-camp subconsciousness as automaton-like,

as acting in accordance to a dictate other than individual

choice. In turn, the ineradicable permanence of the camp

in the survivor's existence is reinforced whilst the

incommunicability of that permanence - and the paralysis

which it evokes - is underscored. Clearly then, the will

to return has to be reformulated in the light of having

returned. In the death-camp, return functions as a

projection of hope, survival, continuity. After

liberation, after having returned, the self is threatened

by deep memory's interjections by the same sense of

disorientation and fragmentation which was experienced in

the camps, projecting the survivor, thus, back to the

Lager.

B. DREAMS OF RETURN AS THE UNLISTENED TO STORY

It would seem that, in the dream narratives of

replacement in Auschwitz, another mechanism is operating.

If Auschwitz has come to be shown as a radical challenge to

the referential capacity of language, that is, to

language's seamless ability to represent the realities to

which it claims attachment, then the very reality of return

has to be placed into question as a possible deception, as

an illusory referent. Just as the logic of power in the

Lager functions through the deception and dissimulation

articulated through bureacratic language, the extension of

that logic impacts on the survivor's post-camp life-world

as a calling into question the very possibility of an

after. The dream of never-ending returns to the death-camp

121

therefore functions as a challenge to the very materiality,

the "reality" of liberation. This would suggest that the

challenge

subsumes

returning.

of

the

Auschwitz to language and

referentiality of return,

representation

even after

In order to explore this phenomenon it is

useful to turn to the account of the two recurring dreams

which Primo Levi relates in two separate texts.

The first dream is narrated in his first text which is

an account of Auschwitz and his survival. (1962 :46) The

second dream is narrated in his second text which is an

account of his return to his hometown in Italy following

liberation and finds resonance in Delbo' s Mesure de nos

Jours in its exploration of post-Auschwitz existence and

representation of the survivor. The initial dream is a

recurring dream which Levi dreams whilst in Auschwitz. The

dream anticipates how after his return, he will sit with

his sister and friends and tell them about his experience

in the Lager. The dream presents his listeners as unable

to understand him, his words, and his story. Instead, they

begin to speak amongst themselves of other things and

finally rise and leave him without saying another word (to

him). Levi's narrator then recounts how, after his return,

his second recurring dream occurs as a dream within a

dream. After Auschwitz he dreams that his return to

family, home, wholeness is, itself, a dream, a chimeric

fantasy:

Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which

122

continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, 'Wstawach'. (Ibid.:47)

The narration of these dreams is the narration of

return as displacement/re-placement. Return anticipates

and projects a going back to the sealed-off and inescapable

univers concentrationnaire.

ironically recuperated

displacement effectively

in

An

this

inverted continuity is

narration in which

crossing back

Auschwitz, as

enacts

to the Auschwitz

narrated by Levi,

a perpetual Sisyphean

Lager. The memory of

temporally. projects the

narrator forward, in the first dream, and back, in the

second dream, and in this way its narration creates a

blurring between conscious states of waking and sleeping,

dream and reality, before and after, departure and return.

Narration of return is the telling of rupture (the- "brief

pause"), of displacement, a moving between the inner and

outer dream-realities and.disorientation.

The narrator of La Mesure de nos Jours evokes this

shifting re-placing consciousness of survivor dream

narratives when she provocatively asks - in response to

another survivor's statement that in Auschwitz she had

dreamt of return and following return she dreams of

Auschwitz - "[e]t si on passait du reve a la realite? La

realite, oii: est-ce?" (202) (and if one passed from dream to

reality? Reality, where is it?) Thus, through its very

narration the return is placed in doubt, it is a "deception

of the senses".

I would suggest that the deception of return is not

only a manifestation of a narration at the limits of

representability but also a manifestation of a

problematised reception, a refused reception of the

survivor's story. Deep memory interrupts narratives with

123

its silences, its contestations and fragmentations,

inserting into the progression of narrative an anti­

historicising, anti-narrativising impulse which subverts

that which precedes and follows it.

Historian Annette Wieviorka, suggests that following

the war, historians had been unable to integrate the

silences in survivor testimony into historical narratives

and, she continues, therefore transposed this apparent

"muteness" back onto the survivors:

En matiere d'histoire, la notion d'indicible apparait cozrune une notion paresseuse. Elle a exonere l 'historien de sa tache qui est precisement de lire les temoignages des deportes, d'interroger cette source ma1eur de l'histoire de la deportation, jusque dans ses silences. Elle a transfere sur les deportes la responsabilite du mutisme des historiens. (1992: 165) In the subject of history, the notion of the unsayable appears as an idea of laziness. It has exonerated the historian from his/her task which is precisely to read the testimonies of the deportees, to interrogate this major source of the history of the deportation exactly in its silences. It has transferred onto the deportees the responsibility of the historians' muteness.

Arguably, the figure of the historian could function as the

metonymic representation of the post-Auschwitz world-as­

unwilling interlocutor. As tradional representative of

the empirical, legalistic and forensic demands which

underpin the production of historical truths, the

historians' silence represents a resistance to the

cognitive assimilation of the survivor's testimony which

reproduces, in its structure and content, the disrupting

124

and fragmentary silences of deep memory's trauma. As such,

the dream narratives of survivor testimony anticipate

return as a dismissed testimony, an unlistened to story,

which, in turn, places that very return into question.

In part a function of both a dismissive and rejecting

post-Auschwitz world represented by the unlistened to story

and in part a function of the double-bind' s speaking

silence/silent speaking structure from which a fragmented

speaking emerges, the survivor's return to the

possibility of life, to language is framed in this

narrative as an experience of extreme alienation and

profound loneliness. Hence, Gilberte, survivor/narrator

of one of the volume's micronarrati ves, describes the

unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable return as 11 cette

solitude intolerable" ( 24) (this intolerable loneliness)

which continuously plunges the survivor back into the

hermetic Auschwitz Lager.

C. RETURN DISRUPTED BY DEEP MEMORY 1 S TEMPORALITIES

Return from Auschwitz anticipates the experience of

life after Auschwitz as an absence, as "suspension

d'existence" (12) (suspension of existence). An

unrecuperable continuity with pre-Auschwitz frames of

reference, represented by a loss of memory, is reinforced

in representations of the survivor's temporal

consciousness. By expressing the experience of temporality

as a caesura the survivor is presented as having been

displaced from one hermetic space to another: from the

sealed off experience of the Lager to a return to a world

whose experience is described as "un monde a part" (13) (a

world apart) .

The representations of return in this volume present

deep memory as an immanent present time of the Lager whose

temporal di.mensions of a simultaneous compression and

125

suspension suggest that its anti-historical dimension

perpetually disrupts the survivor's experience of having

returned. Thus Gilberte narrates this disruption in her

inability to discern either the point of departure marked

by the consciousness of a moment or the passage of time

that has passed since that moment:

Depuis ... Jene sais pas. Jene fais rien. Si on me demandait ce qui s'est passe depuis le retour, je repondrais: rien. [ . .. J Je me repete pour m' en assurer qu 'il y a vingt-cinq ans que nous sommes rentres, sinon je ne le croirais pas. Je le sais comme on sait que la terre tourne, parce qu'on l'a appris. Il faut y penser pour le savoir. ( 41) Since ... I do not know. I do nothing. If one asked me what has happened since returning, I would respond: nothing [ ... ] I repeat to myself in order to reassure myself that it is twenty five years since we came back, if not I would not believe it. I know like it is known that the earth turns, because it has been learnt. It is necessary to think about it in order to know it.

By introducing the temporal deictic "depuis" (since) and

then literally disrupting its marking of an instant by

following its utterance with three points de suspension,

suspension points, the narrator emphasises the primacy of

deep memory's presence in the narration of return. This is

highlighted by the antagonism between deep and common

memory which is invoked in

"croyance" (belief) , "penser"

the opposition

(thought) ,

between

"savoir"

(knowledge) and their disruption by "depuis" (since) which

tails off, reinforced by the negation of "rien" (nothing).

Mado's narration reveals the day of deportation as the

moment which marks a continuity with the temporality of the

Lager. but not with a prior te~poral mode. That day

126

represents "le dernier jour de ma vie ... Je n'ai pas change

d'age, je n'ai pas vieilli. Le temps ne passe pas. Le

temps s'est arrete. (52) (the last day of my life ... I am

the same age, I have not aged. Time does not pass. Time

has stopped.) Once again the points de suspension, the

suspension marks literally punctuate the narrative as an

end-of-history consciousness which is revealed in so many

of these narrations. It becomes clear that in the representation of these

survivors' post-Auschwitz temporal consciousness, the very

notion of return begins to signify the subversion of its

implicit meaning: the movement in time which marks a

retrieval of continuity or the moment of a new beginning.

As such, deep memory, represented in the survivor's

temporal consciousness, seems to preclude both survival

and return. In its radical breaching of an unproblematic

historical existence, deep memory, expressed in a collapse

of the consciousness of unfolding temporality, presents

these versions of survival as the absence of life. It is

precisely the presentation of animating a temporal rupture

which informs the representation of deep memory described

by Mada:

Les gens croient que les souvenirs deviennent flous, qu'ils s'effacent avec le temps, le temps auquel rien ne resiste. C' est cela, la difference; c'est que sur moi, sur nous, le temps ne passe pas. Il n'estompe rien, il n'use rien. Je suis morte a Auschwitz et personne ne le voit. (66) People believe that memories become blurred, that they are erased with time, time against which nothing can hold out. This is exactly the difference; that over me, over us, time does not pass. It wipes nothing out, it wears nothing down. I have died at Auschwitz and nobody sees it.

127

The shedding skin metaphor examined in Chapter One,

metonymic metaphor for the body-as-memory or the embodied

memory of la memoire profonde returns in this narrative to

present survival as the return of death in Auschwitz. This

presentation would suggest that the survivor is condemned

to survive for if deep memory, as memory of the senses, is

inscribed in the corporeal presence of the survivor it can

never be erased nor change in form nor impact.

D.· THE GHOST/WRITER RETURNS

Central to the survivor narratives in this text is the

representation of return - and the narration of return - as

a disorientation and displacement. Return comes to signify

a threat to the very integrity of the survivor's being in

her/his experience of life as rupture. Significantly,

the French text repeatedly employs the term revenant

(ghost), in self-representations of both survivor and the

dead. Revenant, in its polyvalent resonance in French,

comes to incorporate both significations of a ghost, a

material apparition which ressembles a dead person and as

re-venant, a person who returns, comes back again. In its

ambiguous and multiple meanings it can also be read as the

presence of the Lager which perpetually returns.

The figure of the revenan t becomes an important trope

through which the survivor's problematic self­

representation. as well as his/her temporal experience of

present time which is predicated on a forgetting of the

pre-Auschwitz past and a re-placing remembrance of the

eternally present past of the concentrationary universe is

revealed. The figure of the revenant clearly highlights

the survivor's experience of alienation and a

problematisation of the historical present time of

narration. Indeed, the very concept of a ghost calls

128

attention to the narrative construction of itself as a

representational device, a likeness. A signifier of

similarity, of duplication, and of absent materiality, the

ghost gestures to the same disembodying splitting operated

by the Lacanian mirror. Hence, when Mado narrates that Je

suis autre ( 60) (I am other) , she articulates the

survivor's experience of fragmented subjectivity, the

returning self as disembodied from the pre-Lager past and

the post-Lager liberation. (Hoppe, 1984) Return becomes a

"ghosting" of another self of which there remains no trace.

This is clearly highlighted in the following extract:

Comment me rehabi tuer a un moi qui s'etait si bien detache que je n'etais pas sure qu'il eut jamais existe? Ma vie d'avant? Avais-je eu une vie avant? Ma vie d'apres? Etais-je vivante pour avoir un apres, pour savoir ce que c'est qu'apres? (14) How do I get reaccustomed/used to a self which had detached itself so well that I was uncertain if it had ever existed? My life before? Did I have a life before? My life after? Was I alive to have an after, to know what an after is?

The characterisation of the survivor as ghostly apparition

embeds into the narration an explicit expression of the

sheer arbitrariness of survival, of having accidentally

returned from certain death. This expression emerges in

the same moment as those who did not survive are named:

[ ... ] Il faudrait expliquer l'inexplicable expliquer pourquoi Viva qui etait si forte est-elle morte et non pas moi pourquoi Mounette qui etait ardente et fiere est-elle morte

129

et non pas moi pourquoi Yvonne qui etait resolue et non pas Lulu [ ... ] (78) It would be necessary to explain the inexplicable to explain why Viva who was so strong died and not me why Mounette who was so passionate and proud died and not me why Yvonne who was so resolved and not Lulu

This extract clearly highlights how the silencing guilt of

the survivor operates in its subversion of the imputation

of all meaning to survival precisely in its search for

meaning ( "expliquer 1 1 inexplicable", explain the

inexplicable) . The narrator's expression of arbitrary

return becomes, at the same time, a ritualised naming

underlined by the incantational refrain of "pourquoi"

(why) and "non pas moi" (not me). These names, in turn,

assume their own signifying presence in the text as the

eternal "true witnesses" whose stories are imbricated in

the survivor narratives by the ghost-writer who is the

witness by proxy, the survivor/narrator.

The representation of the survivor/narrator as ghost­

writer which emerges here assumes particular significance

in this text where the survivor is simultaneously

represented as the ghost (returns from certain death) who

narrates as well as the narrator who bears witness on

behalf of the dead. The ambiguity which emerges in the

dual signification of the image of the ghost-writer is

further underlined by Delbo' s theorisation of the two

memories, deep and common, which animate the survivor who

moves in between two spaces, two temporalities.

130

The metaphor of the ghost-writer is revealed in the

survivor/narrator's presentation of repatriation as the

progressive inability to distinguish dead compatriots from

living survivors or from the crowds of people awaiting

their repatriation on ~rrival in Paris. This presentation

clearly anticipates the ambivalent representations of the

survivor both as a medium through which the dead speak as

well as one who occupies a· world in-between. (9) Quite

literally a medium, the narrator addresses her friends who

died in Auschwitz in direct speech, as present addressees

and, as such, presciently anticipates the ontological

dilemmas of survival and return 11 Viva, ou es-tu? Non, tu

n'etais pas dans l'avion avec nous. Si je confonds les

mortes et les vivantes, avec lesquelles suis-je, moi ? 11 (10-

11) {Viva, where are you? No, you were not in the aeroplane

with us. If I confuse the dead with the living, with whom

exactly am I?). At the same time the narrator anticipates

her isolation, her own unacknowledged return, from the

world to which she returns by concluding that she herself

has become transparent I ghostly I II [ • • •) j I etais aussi

transparente, aussi irreelle, aussi fluide qu'elles." (10)

(I was as transparent, as unreal, as fluid as they).

Ultimately, these representations of the survivor as

spectral presences, narrate in a very immediate and literal

manner the returning survivor's radical· isolation from

human community, from intimate contact. As the

micronarrati ve of Ida reveals, she returns after having

lost her entire family at Auschwitz. 11 Il ne me restai t

aucun parent, tous avaient ete pris[,) 11 she writes, "[t)ous

etaient morts la-bas." (117) (I had no remaining relatives,

everyone had been taken, everyone died there.) By

repeating that she has no surviving family or relatives Ida

emphasises that nothing remains to which she can return.

Any tenuous memory of a pre-Auschwitz past is negated by

the extermination of any remaining witness to that past.

131

III. ENDING WITH RETURN

By ending this volume with the survivor's return, 'the

.interpretative limits of texts of the

modulated by the survivor's resonating,

story. Eli Wiesel, articulates

Holocaust are

if fragmented,

this idea of

reappropriating survivor's memory as a way to underline the

perpetual and incommunicable isolation of the survivor

after Auschwitz in an essay entitled, A Plea for the

Survivors. By presenting representation as a cognitive

abyss which will always separate the survivor from the

addressee, Wiesel implies that the limits of interpretative

and theoretical possibilities of readings are produced

through the representation of the breach:

The survivor speaks in an alien tongue. You will never break its code. His works will be of only limited use to you. They are feeble, stammering, unfinished, incoherent attempts to describe a single moment of being painfully, excruciatingly alive - the closing in of darkness for one particular individual, nothing more and perhaps much less. Between the survivor's memory and its reflection in words, his own included, there is an unbridgeable gulf. The past belongs to the dead, and their heirs do not recognize themselves in its images and its echoes. [ ... ] A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or it is not about Auschwitz. One cannot imagine Treblinka, just as one cannot reinvent Ponar. (Wiesel, 1978:198)

Here the restitution of the survivor's tongue/language (a

linguistic polyvalence which emerges in the use of the

132

French word "la langue") as the re-embodyment of memory

coincides with the limits of representation and

interpretation of survivor narrative.

By examining questions relating to healing trauma, to

the retraumatisation of the unlistened-to-story and to the

return of deep memory within a narrative structured through

a series of separate yet thematically interlinked

conversations, interviews / anecdotes and meditations in

prose and poetry, Delbo' s text once again manifests a

resistance to a teleological narration. In this way 1 the

volume incorporates into its very structure a contestation

of the addressee's or reader's expectations from narrative

which serves, in turn, to highlight the ways that silences

of the survivor are produced: as response to a disbelieving

post-war world which seeks the kinds of essentialist

meanings that can be anchored in foreclosed narratives of

the past. Over against the representation of silence as

response to the unwilling addressee, this volume presents

survivor silences as an obviation of healing through

"mastery", through a telling of the memory of trauma. The

narration of the memory of trauma simultaneously becomes

the narration of memory as trauma and retraumatisation.

This study has

133

AFTERWORDS

attempted to demonstrate how

representations of personal memory contest disembodying and

overarching historical truths while investigating these

memories, often fragmented and dislocated, within the

responsible limits of a reality which underpins that truth.

At the same time this examination has attempted to approach

the traces of Holocaust memory as a supplementary reading

to the history which mediates it and which it mediates.

By setting up a theorisation of survivor memory as

embodied inscription in Chapter One I have tried to

construct a conceptual framework as an interpretative

approach to the discontinuities of silent memory. Besides

recognising the important role that the body plays in

transacting violence (Feldman, 1991), presenting the body

as the material locus of memory recalls us to the way that

corporeality is inextricably bound to metaphysical

conceptions of human existence. (Amery, 1986:28) Thus, by

conflating memory with body, I have attempted to

demonstrate that remembering the body's violation becomes

a double remembering by gesturing both to the violation of

the humanity of the individual and to the trauma of that

violation which remains both hidden and immanent in the

silences of memory.

In the second Chapter I have outlined the

contradictory impulses represented by survivor silence and

attempted to examine how these paradoxical urges to testify

and to remain silent are fundamental to the narration of

the memory of trauma. In turn, the ways that tropes of

silence and of language are implicated in the radical

alienation, powerlessness and dehumanisation of the

individual in the Lager are examined.

Thematically counterpointed to the first volume, my

analysis of the second volume in Chapter Three has tried to

investigate the meanings of "relationship", of 11 dialogue 11,

134

as a narrative strategy of memory and as a way to highlight

the rupture signified by Auschwitz. Telling the story of

the past, of existence in the Lager and of relationships

with other camp inmates proceeds through a systematic

rewriting of a literary tradition as a way to insert into

that tradition the absolute breach represented by the

Auschwitz experience.

I have tried to demonstrate in the final chapter that

the displacements of memory and silence are often enacted

in the reception of testimonies. By presenting survival

itself as an essentially disturbing and threatening state

of being I have attempted to investigate how

displacement/displacing mechanisms occur in the

transmission and reception of testimony and how these

mechanisms are constructed as threatening to a collective

memory of the past. Now, more than ever, as survivors pass on, and

memories of the past are no longer living memories, the

difficult questions of historical context and of historical

relevance are inevitably raised when an examination of

silenced/silent fragments of memories is undertaken.

Annette Wieviorka indirectly responds to Eli Wiesel's

description, at the beginning of this study, of the

contemporary era's literature being, primarily, one of

testimony, whose memory of the past serves a vision of the

future, with her own observations on the changing forms and

functions of testimony. ( 1992: 161-166) In the period

following the Second World War different perspectives and

agencies collectively informed the way the past was

represented: victims, survivors, perpetrators, bystanders,

Resistance fighters and collaborators provided testimonies

which would function as necessary historical records

enabling the essential construction of an enduring body of

knowledge about the genocide. (Wieviorka, 1992:161) Today,

according to Wieviorka, testimony does not have to realise

135

these events, its function is 11 les maintenir presents. Il

doit etre un vecteur de la transmission pour les

generations d' apres". · (1992: 161) (to maintain them as

present. It must be a vector of transmission for the

generations after) .

Delbo has commented that one of the reasons for

writing Aucun de nous ne reviendra in 1945 and then placing

the manuscript aside for twenty years before publishing it

was to "see if it would withstand the test of time, since

it had to travel far into the future." (Houlding, 1995:3)

Elsewhere, in her impassioned condemnation of the atrocity

and horror of the Gulag she observes:

[n]ous, victimes d'un fou sanguinaire, nous qui pensions que la fin du fou sanguinaire signifiai t la fin du systeme concentrationnaire, il nous faut maintenant vivre avec cette veri te-la: il y a encore des camps. Verite insupportable. (1995:137) [w] e, victims of a bloodthirsty madness, we who thought that the end of the bloodthirsty madness meant the end of the concentrationary system, we now have to live with this truth: there are more camps. Unbearable truth.

Contained in these statements is the belief that if memory

serves a vision of the future, implicit in such vision is

a certain redemptive view of the past. (Benjamin, 1968)

The question is raised: how can the fragments and shards of

memory of an event of unimaginable proportions contain any

such vision? It would seem to me that, while we can be

aware of the inappropriateness of historical comparison,

the methodology of examinations of memory can inform other

readings and understandings of the politics and poetics of

the memory of trauma. Such understandings could be

imported into other historical contexts.

136

Clearly, there remains a profound tension, often

covered over, between personal memory, collective memory,

public memory, popular memory and historical practice. Yet,

at the same time, I would say that it is necessary for such

investigations of memory to remain sensitive to the ways in

which they key into debates of historicisation or

historical relativism. As this study has progressed, the

notion of investigating personal memory has taken on very

different meanings in the light of a personal interest and

active observation of the unfolding historical process of

the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

{Grunebaum-Ralph, 1996, 1997} This process has seen the

emergence, in public spaces, of debates on memory, history,

truth and justice. The very public and visually immediate

way that these questions in the form of open and

televised hearings - are raised and engaged with testifies

to the ongoing tensions which emerge between personal,

public and collective memory; academic and official

historical practice; the establishment of forensic,

juridical and historical Truth and truths. At the same

time the individual testimony, the personal and devastating

effects of trauma are often ellided in service of

specifically nationalistic or totalising historical

narratives. Holocaust memory itself, has been implicated

in this process in a very peculiar way: it underpins a move

in historical and certain political circles to relativise

the past in South Africa. (Braude,1996} The question which

I have been asking myself is how would Delbo comment on the

role of memory in collective examinations of the past, in

South Africa? How would she have her testimony to the past

read in such a context? What does her theory of embodied

memories mean in this context? How can navigating the

difficult and sometimes contradictory representations of

personal memory in Delbo's texts be modulated by ethical

considerations?

137

This examination of the representations of the memory

of torture, trauma and atrocity has attempted to

investigate the ways that personal memory intervenes in and

facilitates its own narration. What emerges is a testimony

to the ways that remembering atrocity threatens to subvert

its own telling, to dissipate in its own fragmentary

silences.

138

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